Five Sins of Tech Journalism

If a journalist covering the federal government of Canada were to write that Prime Minister Harper smothers babies in their sleep, they'd find themselves out of work pretty quickly.  Also probably sued for libel.  Rightly so as well, we've come to expect a certain level of quality in journalism, and while there are obvious examples of bad journalists in all fields it seems that tech journalism suffers from a fairly high number of them.  In politics one can point to Fox News as a place where sensationalist and often downright deceptive journalism is rewarded, but in tech journalism they're all too easy to find.

Part of the problem is that making incorrect or outrageous statements is often rewarded.  The need for traffic, which drives revenue, often means that getting the clicks is often more important than getting the facts.  Good SEO (search engine optimization) often trumps good reporting and in the world of blogging simply quoting a few paragraphs from someone else's published work will often get you paid as much as having done the work yourself.

It's hard to pick just five things that I see wrong with a lot of tech reporting, but the internet likes lists so here is a list of five of the most common mistakes.  If you see these sins in a piece then you should start to be more skeptical as you read.  If you see more than one then you might as well be reading fiction.

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Vancouver gaming industry looks out for its own with fundraising event

Disclaimer:  I'm currently working for Relic Entertainment and worked near Brian Wood.  Thus I'm not particularly impartial on the subject.

Unfortunately my first demonstration of how small, and close-knit that the Vancouver games industry is was with the death of Brian Wood earlier this month.  

Wood was a Lead Designer at Relic and had worked on the Vancouver developer's Company of Heroes Online, and sat not ten feet away from me.  I didn't know him particularly well, but he always seemed like a nice guy and so it was shocking when we found out that he had been killed by a reckless driver in Washington State at the start of the month.  The story would have been tragic even if he had not left behind his wife and their unborn child, both of whom are likely only alive due to his quick-thinking actions in the moments before the accident.

Friends and family of Brian setup a trust in his name to help support his family and people have continued to pitch in with assistance.  A former Relic employee now at Bungie, makers of the Halo franchise, auctioned off a deluxe Halo: Reach Xbox 360 package on eBay raising more than $3,000 USD for the trust.  And now the local gaming industry are getting into the action with an event on October 1st put on by EXP Entertainment.

Gaming on The Rocks (Facebook event listing) is being held at the Holiday Inn on Howe Street in Vancouver, and promises to be the most fun you've ever had while raising money for a good cause.  From a silent auction full of very cool stuff collected by gaming companies like Radical, Relic and far-flung parent companies like Activision and THQ to raffles dances, DJs and classic gaming fun, the night is sure to be exciting.

Alright, I'm not happy about DJs being there either, but it's a nit-pick.

The evening promises to have:

☑ NO COVER!!
☑ FREE GAMING!!
☑ 200 CAPACITY!! ARRIVE EARLY!!

☑ SWAG GIVEAWAYS!!
☑ GAME GIVEAWAYS!!
☑ PREVIEW BUILDS OF NOT YET RELEASED GAMES!!

☑ WICKED MUSIC PROVIDED BY PRO DJS MANOS & D-FENS!!
☑ AWESOME DRINKS PREPARED BY AWESOME BARTENDERS!!
☑ DELICIOUS SUSTENANCE PREPARED AND COOKED ON SITE!!

If I haven't sold you on it yet then I will play my trump card: there will be playable Super Nintendo games.

Bottom line it should be a good time, and it's a fantastic example of how the local game community can pull together to raise money for a good cause.  If you're not able, or inclined, to attend please consider making a contribution to the Brian Wood Memorial Trust.

HootSuite joins the HTML5 bandwagon

If it seems as if we're covering every update to Vancouver produced Twitter client HootSuite, it's because we are.  The fact is that each recent update of HootSuite has warranted coverage, as the boys and girls in the Owl-Cave have been working to add a host of new features to each and every revision.  Released overnight the latest version of HootSuite, called HootSuite5, ads in support for HTML5 which allows for a number of new goodies that include:

  • geo-location tweet searching
  • new themes
  • new Facebook features
  • choice between new and old style re-tweets
  • connection to Google Analytics
  • drag and drop editing

While HootSuite is not for the casual Twitter user, it remains the best professional level social media tool available on the internet.  If you are managing a brand online and not using HootSuite to run that brand's associated Twitter account you might as well be going into work drunk.

If you can't tell I kind of think HootSuite is the bees' knees.

New Facebook game rewards players for making healthy choices

Facebook games are popular, and as the success of Nintendo's Wii Fit proved games that promise to help you get healthy are even more popular.  The combination of the two, a Facebook game with knock-on health benefits, could potentially prove to be the most popular game ever and end up creating Skynet as a result.  

Well if we're now doomed to live in a post-Apocalyptic future where we are hunted by murderous robots, we had better be in good health.  All that running is going to be hard to do on our all-McDonald's-diets.  

Vancouver's Ayogo Games, Inc. launched HealthSeeker this week, that very Facebook game that promises to help users get into better health.  (The sentient future death AI is not currently a listed feature).  As noted in the game's press release (warning the press release includes excessive capitalization):

HealthSeeker™ is an innovative, unique, online experience that combines a supportive social networking environment with important information on managing diabetes.  The game utilizes the player's own Facebook® friends as sources of inspiration and support on the road to better health.  There are MISSIONS and ACTION STEPS to help players achieve LIFESTYLE GOALS and create an opportunity to advance in the game.  These LIFESTYLE GOALS include eating more healthfully, achieving or maintaining a healthy weight, improving one’s  diabetes control and lowering cardiovascular risk factors.  As ACTION STEPS are completed and players return to report their progress, they receive experience points and other awards for their achievements.

HealthSeeker™ is a unique collaboration between diabetes experts and patient advocates who are on the front lines of diabetes care. It was developed by the Diabetes Hands Foundation in collaboration with Joslin Diabetes Center, with financial support provided by Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

The game is backed by medical research and with a focus on patients with diabetes, it's goal beyond general health is to help those with the condition manage their daily situation.  As an actual doctor notes in the previously quoted press release:

"As a clinician who has been treating people with diabetes for over 30 years, I can tell you that food is often the most frustrating area of concern for people with the condition," said Dr. Richard Jackson, an endocrinologist and Director of Medical Affairs, Healthcare Services, Joslin Diabetes Center and Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.  "We hope this novel and engaging game will break down some of the barriers that are preventing people with diabetes from building a successful lifestyle approach to their condition."

Now aren't you sad that you deleted your Facebook profile?  Don't worry I'm sure the machines will need human slaves to start with.

Calgary designed iPhone game is App Store hit

In October 2009  Ph03nix New Media launched Canada's first iPhone development fund to promote the creation of iPhone applications.  Since then the market for iPhone applications has exploded, and Ph03nix New Media is seeing the payoff with Big Stack Studios' Sigma for the iPhone.

The puzzle game has been a hit for the start-up studio, with a marketing push by Apple who featured the app in its New and Notable section of the iTunes App Store.  The game has reached #16 in the Canadian App Store and #17 down in the United States.

An addictive puzzler, the game manages to emulate the addictive qualities of Bejewled or Tetris, prompting players to shoot coloured blocks back and forth across the screen in order to match sets of three. 

Urbanizer wants to know what mood you're in so it can take you for a drink

"The first telephone directory, consisting of a single page, was issued on February 21, 1878." - Wikipedia

Mood MapThe race to make the telephone directory relevant in the age of Google continues with the recently released Urbanizer, an iPhone application aiming to be the pocket sized hip extension of that dead tree tomb that sits unused in a corner of your desk drawer.  On the go and want to know where to eat, well that's what Urbanizer is for. The catch with Urbanizer, the thing that separates it from the crowd of other location based applications is that it doesn't just group its suggestions based on location, user ratings or any of that useful stuff it suggests places based on your mood.

Urbanizer is from the good people at the Yellow Pages.  It also has a website that shows mood maps for the cities where the application currently works (Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Ottawa).  The application includes the now obligitory social media functions, allowing your suggestions to be refined by what your friends are digging.  It feels a bit odd to use an app where “hipster snack” is an option, but maybe that's just me.

Hootsuite's Vorsprung durch Technik

HootsuiteForgive Babel Fish's shoddy German, but it just did not feel right to title a post about the addition of localization support to Twitter manager extraordinaire HootSuite without at least trying to make it multilingual.  Localization support for Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese and German joins the previous translation services that the application offered in its last update.  

According to HootSuite the latest update also adds:

Facebook Commenting – In addition to Pages and Profiles, add comments to anything in which appears in the News Feed

Contextual Conversation – See the history behind messages to understand the back-story before following up to replies

Persistent Placement – HootSuite returns users to the same place in the stream after taking a phone call or using another app

Saved Draft – Users can finish writing a Twitter message later without starting from scratch if interrupted or delayed

Future Reading – Save the contents of a link to read when convenient on iPhone or web via the (free) Instapaper service

Forward by Email - Send along updates to non-Twitter-users to share important info and keep colleagues up to date

Bump to Follow – Released a few weeks ago in the HootSuite labs, users can follow one another with a hand gesture using the iPhone motion sensing abilities

HootSuite remains one of the best Twitter applications for social media and marketing professionals who need to manage a brand identity on Twitter.  

BCIT launches iPad app development course

This fall the British Columbia Institute of Technology will be expanding its existing iPhone application development course into a stand-alone iPad course to help guide students through the process of developing for Apple's newly released iPad.  Last summer I wrote about the first iteration of the school's iPhone development course, then focused on games, and from all accounts it has been a success.  The iPad application development class is a follow-up to students who have already taken the iPhone course or have iPhone development experience previously. 

BCIT lists the course on its online catalouge thusly:

This hands-on course is designed for those who have already completed COMP 3906 and those with equivalent iPhone programming experience. Students who are already accomplished at building iPhone applications will focus on creating iPad applications using their own personal iPad and Intel based MacBook. BCIT students who do have the current hardware are entitled to purchase from Apple Canada at a discount. After learning to provision their own devices with the iPad SDK for development, programmers will start designing iPad specific applications that leverage the new 1024 x 768 screen size and support multiple orientations, using accelerometers. Topics include: split view controllers, popovers, custom input views, plus iPad audio and video capabilities. Each participant will also learn to handle events, utilize enhanced text, generate PDF documents, and integrate with Core Location and MapKit. The BCIT School of Computing is a member of the Apple iPhone Developer University program. Those registered in this course will be granted access to Apple?s resources for development and testing at no extra cost. By the end of this advanced course, iPhone programmers will learn to design, build and present a software application for the iPad. Prerequisites:COMP 3906 or MDIA 2652 (1.5 Credits)

The Province's Print Extras might be the Maginot Line

From Twitter:

From @JefferySimpson: A sign that The Province is still hoping that this whole internet fad goes away soon. http://yfrog.com/6bo0qj

From @TheProvince: No way! Then we wouldn't be able to do this: http://ow.ly/1Sdcr @laura_l

Print Extra

This Twitter exchange was prompted when I came across the pictured tag at the end of an article on smuggling drugs from Canada to the United States (I'm a freelance writer, smuggling drugs might be a way to make ends meet in a slow month) in an issue of The Province this week.  That issue (published May 31st) included this declaration stating that going forward not everything that appears in the printed Province will be appearing online.

It's a short read, and so for full context check it out, but I think that this paragraph best sums it up:

In the paper, Print Extras are stories that go further than the basic news stories on the web. They aim to put issues into context for you and/or give you more background on a story. Sometimes they represent exclusive news no one else has. Sometimes a "print extra" is nothing more than a fine bit of writing and storytelling.

I'm a freelance writer, and so I'm loath to be critical of any possible publication that might one day buy something from me but I just don't think that this strategy is going to work.  Let's ignore that the link The Province's Tweet rebuttal included sent me to a Flash page that I couldn't read on either my iPhone or iPad.  I've got enough to say without bringing up HTML5.

Before I go deep into this I'll point out that I don't own a newspaper.  I ran a student newspaper for a few years, it never lost money and all the staff got free t-shirts with the newspaper's logo on the front, but then again we had a student levy that helped pick up the slack and at the time the web had not yet started to really cut into newspaper readership.  I've also written for newspapers with far worse websites, and even wrote a variation of what I'm going to say here for that paper.  They declined to publish it and politely asked me to submit something else.  Also before we go below the jump my idea of what a newspaper should be like online is The Guardian.  It's continual addition of new forms of media, along with an established stable of podcasts and the fact that you never feel as if they're holding anything back for the print edition, makes it an example of what a newspaper should be evolving towards.

Let us continue, as they say, below the fold.

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Burnaby's MetroLyrics launches iPhone app and reaches number three with a bullet

MetroLyrics iPhone appIf there's ever been a bit of music stuck in your head that you couldn't identify, or if you ever wanted to angrily quote some Nine Inch Nails at an ex-boyfriend, chances are your Google search for the words have lead you to MetroLyics.  The site, headquartered in Burnaby British Columbia, is one of the internet's best lyric repositories and that has helped it become the third largest music website in the world.  With more than 120 million page views a month it also claims the title of most visited lyrics website and the site most visited by mobile devices in the United States.

Company founder Milun Tesovic is featured in an interview published today over at Under 30 CEO where he outlines the company's (and his own) future plans thusly:

We have many plans to expand and become a very personalized destination for our audience who have a deep connection to music at MetroLyrics. We’re also focused on providing and bringing lyrics to our users through our soon to be released iPhone app.  As for me, I love what I do and I love watching not just our website grow but our team as well.  I plan to finish school this year and just continue on doing what I’m doing.

The iPhone application hit the app store at the end of May and at $2.99 gives easy access to the MetroLyrics library and ties into the usual social networking suspects so you can broadcast that Neil Diamond turn of phrase to all your friends.