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MasterMaq's Blog

Edmonton Blogger & Social Media Guy

Notes for 11/30/2008Today

Here are my weekly notes:

• This week Twitter announced they will no longer be able to send messages to Canadians via SMS due to rising costs. Stupid Canadian mobile industry. Apparently Twitter also turned down a $500 million takeover offer from Facebook. And finally, Shaq is on Twitter!
• Okay one more sort of about Twitter – CNN covered the impact of social media in relation to the Mumbai terrorist attacks.
• Sometime this week The Pirate Bay turned five years old! Looking forward to another five.
• As you may have noticed, YouTube changed all videos to a widescreen format this week. Great for new videos, but it kinda sucks for the old ones.
• Rumor has it that Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo’s search business for $20 billion. I’ll believe it when I see it.
• Pay attention to the news tomorrow – it seems likely that

Edmonton Notes for 11/29/2008November 29

Here are some Edmonton-related things I found interesting this week:

• I posted about a couple things already: the new hockey arena concept, and the Halloween Festival.
• Today, Canwest Global relaunched about ten websites, one of which was the Edmonton Journal site. Sadly, there’s nothing unique about the new look. Every Canwest newspaper site in the country looks the same. Opportunity missed, I think.
• The latest Edmonton Radio Ratings were released recently. The Fall 2008 book is probably the most important of the year - 630 CHED and CISN Country top the list.
• The Edmonton Sun now has RSS feeds! I wrote more about social media and local news earlier this week.
• The City of Edmonton is considering a hiring freeze for next year, and warns there could be layoffs. Maybe we’re not entirely insulated from the eco

Technologies I’ve Been Exploring RecentlyNovember 29

Tomorrow is Edmonton Code Camp 2008, so with that in mind I thought I’d mention a few of the developer-focused technologies I’ve been messing around with lately. Nothing too in-depth, but enough to get a feel for things.

MSMQ – Microsoft Message Queuing
This technology has been around since Windows NT 4 and Windows 95, but I’ve never really used it before. I decided to check it out after hearing John Bristowe sing its praises at ALT.NET Calgary. So far I’m really impressed. I still can’t believe I never looked into it before! I was able to get a decent sample going for both reading and writing from the queue (transactional too) in about 40 lines of code.

Ninject
This is a dependency injection framework for .NET applications. Dependency Injection (DI) is a technique that helps you create loosely-coupled, flexible code. I’ve looked at other DI frameworks, but was always turned off by the XML configuration files. In that regard, Ninject is a lot like SubSonic – everything is done in code! It’s pretty easy to get started with Ninject. Reading the User Guide

Halloween in Edmonton: DeadmontonNovember 27

I was fortunate enough to be invited to an organizational meeting tonight for a new Halloween-themed festival here in Edmonton. More than just a festival however, the three principals behind the idea (Darryl Plunkie, Derek Clayton, Christian Nelson) have a vision to establish Edmonton as the Halloween Capital of Canada. I’ll admit that I don’t feel as strongly about Halloween as many of the individuals in attendance tonight do, but I am passionate about my city and I think they’re on to something.

Like many Edmontonians, I hate the word “Deadmonton” as it is often used. It’s entirely negative and disheartening. It’s no surprise that I fell in love with Christian Nelson’s presentation back at Pecha Kucha 2, where he suggested we reclaim the word and use it for good. Tonight’s meeting grew out of Christian exploring that idea with Darryl, Derek, and others. The general idea is to create a Halloween Festival to tie together all of the various events that already take place in the city. It was suggested that the festival be a week long, until Darryl said “it should be 13 days!” He also suggested that the organizing board be called the “Co

Social Media and Local News in EdmontonNovember 26

My favorite media/journalism/news blogger is Jeff Jarvis. His blog, BuzzMachine, is a treasure trove of information and insight on how the web is transforming the world of news media. Jeff has spent a lot of time thinking about local news specifically, a topic I am very interested in. Yesterday he wrote a post summarizing his thoughts on where local news might go. These are the highlights for me:

“The next generation of local (news) won’t be about news organizations but about their communities.”

“News will emerge from networks.”

“Do what you do best and link to the rest will be a foundation of the future architecture of news.”

“News will find new forms past the article, which will include any media, wiki snapshots of knowledge, live reports, crowd reports, aggregation, curation, data bases, and other forms not yet created.”

I encourage you to read the entire post, it’s definitely worth it.

Thinking about Jeff’s post made me wonder what local news organizations here in Edmonton are doing to prepare for the future. Are they focused on communities? Are they creating networks? Are