I’ve created my share of digital images.
This blog hosts 337 images so far (and yeah, most are just lame efforts at photoshopping.) I’ve uploaded 1,122 photos to my Flickr account (and yeah, most are just snaps of my wee ones, restricted to friends and family.) Then there’s the miscellaneous ones done during 10 years of working for new media (and yeah, they’ve all wisely been deleted.) It’s a lot of pixels.
And now, I’m delighted to announce, one of my creations has finally garnered the worldwide praise I so richly think I deserve.
Yes, folks, somebody wants one of my public Flickr images for a group! And not just any group… it’s sought after by devotees of… watering cans!
Yes, the above picture - wedged between 2,00 family snaps taken at Franklin’s Garden on Toronto Island, after the CBC picnic - is now a part of the group “Gießkannen - watering cans” on Flickr. Description:
Diese Gruppe ist für Gießkannen.
This group is about watering cans and watering pots.
Of course all the discussion so far is in German, but I like to think of “watering pots” as a language we all speak.
There truly is a Flickr group for everything, no? And now that I’ve found my niche, I sort of want to become an expert. In my mind, I’m already composing shots of that rusty can in our front garden, the little plastic “smiling flower” cans my girls use when they are “helping”, the overpriced silver thing I bought my wife one Mother’s Day. And that’s without even leaving the house!
I may need to buy a new camera…
Last week my boss discovered an(other) amusing deficiency in Microsoft Word.
Open MS Word, and type the word “information”. Then look for a synonym using the built-in thesaurus.
You are offered:
- in order
- in sequence
- in turn
- in rank
- in a row
Not what I was looking for. If you look up “information” elsewhere, say, answers.com, you get words like “knowledge”, “intelligence”, “facts” and “data”. Look any of those up in MS Word, and you get “information” as the first synonym.
I was kinda hoping “knowledge” would say “be acquainted with a protuberance”…
I work for the CBC Digital Archives website (I think it’s OK to say that, right?)
Anyhow, we process a boatload of audio and video. English and French combined, there are more than 12,000 clips online already, with at least 400 more hours in the works in English alone. And since we’re redesigning the site to accomodate bigger, better quality video, we thought we’d better upgrade our storage capacity.
The solution, for the moment, is a black box like the one shown here. To be precise, it’s a LaCie 2.5 terabyte Biggest S2S RAID storage tower. To be impresice, it’s an external hard drive about the size of a shoe box. It weighs a ton, and holds an inconceivable amount of data.
A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes. So this shoe box holds 2,500 gigs - 10 times the amount of data my reasonably new home computer can store. We figure that’ll hold all the high-res videos we are encoding this year.
Which made me wonder how much consumer-level media a drive like this could handle.
So I saved a typical, decent quality YouTube file - in this case, Johnny Cash’s Hurt video (and yeah, I had a little cry first.) It runs about four minutes, and takes up a little over nine megabytes.
Math time:
- 4 minutes = 9 MB
- 1 hour = 135 MB
- 1 day = 3,240 MB (3.24 GB)
- 1 year = 1,183 GB
So… if I were to film myself 24 hours a day in YouTube quality Flash video, I could store a two full years of my life - every second of it - on this one drive.
(I’d upload it, but it’d take you two full years to watch… you might want to fast forward to the good bits. Heck, I’d like to too.)
Yes, I’m playing fast and loose with numbers here - significant rounding of digits, and the drive can’t hold the full 2.5 TB, and Flash video sucks, but you get the point.
Now, how much audio would it hold?
Well, my 15 GB iPod is less than half full (5.6 GB) with 1,567 songs. According to iTunes, that’s enough music to play for 4.2 days without repeating.
If I were to somehow hook up the black box to my iPod, I could hold 446 times as many songs - almost 700,000 songs, enough to last 1,873 days. That’s five straight years of 24/7 music without hearing the same song twice.
Might want to bring the charger, though. Can I borrow some CDs?
One final thought:
Five years ago, the biggest available hard drive for a typical PC was 120 GB, and cost $750. (Our laCie costs around twice that, which would have got you 240 GB in 2002.) Today, that money gets you 10 times as much storage. So it’s reasonable to assume that five years from now, the same drive will hold more than 25 TB.
Meaning that for a couple of grand, you could record every second of your life - from birth to death - on video, and store it in one small black box.
I don’t mind CBC having a blogging policy.
I asked for one, more than a year ago, and got no answer. So did others.
I don’t mind following blogging guidelines. After getting no answer from CBC, I helped write my own.
I don’t even object to most of the line items in the “Personal Blogging - Guidelines for CBC/Radio-Canada Employees” document that was leaked out yesterday. A lot of them are common sense.
But I really, really resent the way this document came about. To wit: it was crafted behind closed doors, in secret, without any consultation with the people who know and care most about it, without any heed to industry best practices, without any transparency or public input.
That’s a pre-lockout mindset, and it coughed up a Web 1.0 policy that makes everyone look foolish. And that, in my opinion, is more damaging than anything any CBC blogger has ever said or done.
The document
The CBC’s blogging guidelines have not been officially distributed, although I have a copy of it. I suspect it wasn’t quite ready for primetime, and a few people have probably had their long weekends ruined as a result of the leak. Especially after it got BoingBoinged.
What’s the document say? After a preamble about the importance of the internet and the rise of blogging, the document states that blogging (and, of note, other self-publishing including podcasting) must be done according to the new guidelines, “if the content clearly associates them with CBC/Radio-Canada.”
Nobody understands what that means. The document later states that:
Blogs or websites which do not identify the bloggers as a CBC/Radio-Canada employee, do not discuss CBC/Radio-Canada and are purely about personal matters would normally fall outside these guidelines.
The ambiguity over what counts as “associating” yourself with CBC, and what counts as “discussing” CBC is worrying, and perhaps purposeful. (If I list myself as “a journalist who works for a Canadian national public broadcaster”, is that identification? Couldn’t you just look me up? What if it’s on my CV? What if I accidentally mention that I was in an elevator with Luba Goy? Can I talk about the bathroom stalls any more? Can I review a Dr. Who episode?)
If you determine you might be associated with CBC or might talk about your employer, there are a number of bullet points to follow. And I have to say most of them are common sense, and simply reiterate the rules CBC journalists already have to follow. Conduct yourself in accordance with your contract, HR policies, and the Journalistic Standards and Practices. Don’t waste CBC time or channels. CBC work belongs to CBC. And so on.
There’s a little confusion over the edict to avoid partisan politics and “controversy”, but that’s all in the JS&P already – a worthy, sensible document, though it could use a little internet-age revision.
The part that’s going to raise hell is the twice-repeated claim that “to start and maintain a blog of this kind, you need your supervisor’s approval.”
I don’t know if that’s legal, enforceable, constitutional or smart. Part of me wants to call a lawyer, call the union, call the Electronic Frontier Foundation to find out. I did consult a professional ethicist who drafts policies like these for a living, and his first impression was not positive. (He promises to weigh in shortly weighs in here with some interesting points.)
But my point is that all these calls should have already been made – by CBC, not by me.
A year late
See, the explosion of CBC employee blogging happened during the 2005 lockout, a time we’d all rather put behind us. Simply put, on the street level PR front, CBC management got it’s ass handed to it on a platter.
And to their credit they made some moves to get with the program: They launched an official blog and hired the most effective locked-out blogger to run it. They cleared the path for official CBC blogs and made an extraordinary push into podcasting. They sent out RFPs for Web 2.0 tools for CBC.ca, explored TV shows with civic input. And they talked a lot about nimbleness, transparency and collaboration. You can argue about the results, but the ship seemed to be headed in the right direction.
I started blogging a few months later, and tried to find out what rules I needed to follow. I asked a manager, a union rep and other bloggers, and nobody knew. Not only was there no official policy, but it appeared (rightly) that none would be coming for a long time.
So a bunch of us got together to write our own guidelines. We called it the CBC Blogging Manifesto (mostly in jest) but really it was just a statement of principles, designed to clarify what we thought was important. It started with:
Use common sense and don’t do anything stupid. Blog to make the CBC better, not to kill it. There are plenty of others who want to do that for us.
I guess the manifesto failed, though. Because what we really wanted was for CBC policy makers to read it and think of it as starting point when they eventually crafted an official policy. We hoped it would open the door to a conversation with people who care deeply about both blogging and the corporation. We hoped that maybe someday, someone might want to talk.
But they didn’t.
Instead, exactly one year later, the management version leaked out, without any conversation at all. It came from somewhere within the Editor in Chief’s office (though I don’t know if it came from the acting or outgoing EIC) and it was distributed somehow (but not to bloggers) by my boss’s boss, then leaked, then clarified as “guidelines” [update: then clarified as “draft guidelines”.] I suppose if I ever receive it through official channels, I’ll have to toe the line, if anyone knows where it is.
I don’t have a problem with that. It’s management’s right - they make the rules, and I’ll do what I’m told. I always do. But MAN! Talk about a wasted opportunity for some good PR, some good advice, and some goodwill.
Outside the box
Here’s what progressive companies do, the ones that understand technology, value employees and care about communication.
They take risks, like Sun Microsystems did.
Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. We need to do a better job of telling the world. As of now, you are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first …. By speaking directly to the world, without benefit of management approval, we are accepting higher risks in the interest of higher rewards….The real goal isn’t to get everyone at Sun blogging, it’s to become part of the industry conversation.
Being a part of the industry conversation seems like something CBC desperately wants.
Same thing happened at IBM more than two years ago:
IBM today is publishing an announcement on its Intranet site encouraging all 320,000+ employees world wide to consider engaging actively in the practice of “blogging”. This move follows several years of persistent grassroots efforts by an informal community of IBM bloggers. Technical leaders like Sam Ruby, Grady Booch, Robert Sutor and business leaders like Ed Brill and Catherine Helzerman have played a very significant role in this effort by providing excellent models for other IBMers to follow. Behind the scenes, a small handful of technical innovators developed and deployed an internal blogging service that has grown in a period of just 18 months to just shy of 9,000 registered users spanning 65 countries….
My godfathers, is the nation’s broadcaster really less progressive with communications than Big Blue?
It has always shocked the hell out of me that in a corporation of 10,000 people, all focused on communications, there are less than two dozen who run blogs under their own names. Maybe now I know why. Maybe my wife was right, and I should have never stuck out my neck. I thought I had proved her wrong when CBC Communications said they liked my work enough to let me fill in on the official CBC blog. Maybe not.
Maybe we should all blog anonymously, neatly sidestepping this policy. Then we can say whatever we want, like we did during the lockout. Lord knows that will reflect more positively on the corporation, right? We all saw what that world was like. Drive everyone underground and create a dozen little CBC Drones and Tea Makers.
Do we even need a policy? Has someone blogged the secret sauce recipe, and needs to be Dooced?
Or could we have just trusted people to use their brains and follow existing policies? Just days before his death, the late David Bazay, then CBC Ombudsman, wrote this on the subject. (He was responding to an anonymous blogger.)
If public broadcasters are to become bloggers I would hope that they would exercise their freedom of speech exactly the way they are compelled to exercise it within the CBC: with accuracy, fairness and integrity, with the responsible speech of CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices that has helped make this place one of the great places in the world where the citizen can be well informed.
That just about makes me want to cry. Whatever happened to those guys who trusted their employees and thought they might – just might – be able to inform people and reflect well on the corporation?
————
Update: According to CBC acting Editor in Chief Esther Enkin, the document circulated was “an early draft of proposed policies” which was “inadvertently passed on”. No specific corporate policies relating directly to blogging are in effect, though other policies still apply. Blogging rules may be coming in the future, and they may take some of this reaction into account.
I’m on a roll with the signage thing - more here - though it would appear my summer reading comes in a much shorter format than other CBC bloggers. I’ve been focusing on CBC signs for the past week, but let’s branch out to some signs just outside Fort Dork.
You may recall that there’s a giant pit just to the east of the CBC’s Toronto HQ. It’s part of the construction of the new Ritz-Carlton hotel and RBC Centre office tower at Wellington and Simcoe streets. (I’ve been snapping some photos along the way and putting them in a Flickr folder - maybe in two years I can create a time-lapse animated .gif, or something.)
Construction is apparently moving apace, despite a strike that nobody noticed from the Laborers’ International Union of North America (L.I.U.N.A. Local 506). That strike consisted of a chain across the entrance way for a few days - no picketers, no website, no concerts by the Barenaked Ladies.
Anyhow, what interests me about this site at the moment is the “branding” on the construction hoarding that surrounds the east end of the site. The RBC Centre is being branded not as “the first new Toronto office tower in a decade”, or “a really tall, expensive container for bankers to roll around in your money”, but something more homey - and ridiculous.
Apparently this is not a building. It’s your new best friend.
It claims to be:
- A building with a work/life balance
- A building that pays its way
- A building comfortable in its own skin
- A building with a conscience
- A building that works for employees
- A building that is breaking ground
- A building that makes an impression
WTF? Is this building actually alive, with blood and emotions and some sort of benign Hal 9000 brain? Are they building it not with jackhammers and concrete and steel, but with spoonfuls of love, group hugs and fluffy bunnies?
Yeah, I get the idea. Personalize the space, appeal to our softer instincts, make it sound as different as possible from the cold, cash-driven sort of banking towers they fly planes into. But come on - it’s an office tower, not a loft, or mom’s house, or a hippy commune.
This sort of cloying anthropomorphism really burns my britches. Anyone who has kids knows what I’m talking about - it’s cute for a while, when little Sally says “that car is happy” or “the sky is crying.” But last week my daughter asked me, “why does the toilet like to eat poo and drink pee?” Yeargh!
If the RBC Centre wants to pretend it’s your cousin, fine. Here are my suggestions for construction hoarding slogans:
- A building that will take out your garbage
- A building that loves long walks on the beach
- A building that would open its windows if they weren’t sealed shut
- A building with an extensive shoe collection
- A building that is a little afraid of lightning
- A building with a degree from Yale
- A building that once had a tryout for the Ti-Cats
- A building with erectile dysfunction
- A building that served three years in the National Guard
- A building that feels guilty when birds hit it
- A building that thinks your weight is just fine
- A building that took a year off to “find itself”
- A building that promises not to shed large pieces of marble
So, what human trait describes the building you work in? (Mine likes to eat poo.)
This has gone too far.
For a few weeks each summer, my CBC Toronto office is blessed with the sound of prepubescent girls screaming in rapture outside the Canadian Idol corral at the convention centre across the street. In addition to Kelly Clarkson brand tube tops and bristol board signs saying “Marry me Ben”, there’s usually a van, a tent, a PA system and a carnival barker trying to whip the girls into a lather. Until now, all that was across the street - a minor nuisance akin to the guy who plays (sic) bagpipes on Blue Jays days.
Yet now I see that signs for that wretched CTV show have crossed the No Man’s Land of Front Street, and are fluttering gaily right outside the CBC building, not 15′ from the front door. (Hat tip to Erich the Eagle-Eyed for noticing.)
Who the hell let that happen? Really, does nobody at CBC pay attention to advertising availabilities on our own front door? What’s next, Dr. Phil recycling bins for all CBC employees? Ghost Whisper screensavers?
Haven’t we complained enough about the CTV billboards across the road on John St.? Haven’t I created enough ridicule to make anyone care?
I think the only thing left for me to do is audition for Canadian Idol.
Hell, I could do it just by leaning out my office window.
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