that ring of confidence

Jeffery Simpson at #Nash72: the sessions recapped

From January 14th through to the 18th the Canadian University Press (CUP) held their 72nd annual national conference [cup] bringing university and college newspapers from around Canada together.  After a few years away I returned to the conference, this time as a guest speaker.  Here are the sessions I gave and what you may have missed either by not attending or because you were hung over from the night before.

 

Title: Managing PR in Tech Writing
Speakers: Matthew Atwood (Senior PR Manager for Bioware), Jeffery Simpson (freelance tech writer for IGN.com, The Georgia Straight)

Summary: This session had started off just being about tech writing, and I had a talk which I'd previously given twice at regional conferences in Vancouver prepared to give.  The main focus of what I was going to say is that tech writing is one of the more stable fields in writing, and that it's not as difficult as it might appear from the outside.  You don't need to know the coding behind Twitter to write about it, and just because you can't build an iPod doesn't mean you can't cover its development.  I was also going to talk about how tech writing can be done really well by focusing less on the technology and more on the impact to its users, and how it can be done badly such as when writers focus rumours or pundits above reputable sources.

However since the conference was being hosted by The Gateway which is the student paper at the University of Alberta, and because the conference was actually hosted in a hotel connected to Bioware's headquarters and because Gateway alum Dan Lazin works for Bioware as a producer, CUP managed to get MattAtwood to join.  That transformed the tech speech into a talk on how to deal with press relations department when working on tech stories.  Having written stories involving Google [tgs] and Mozilla [tgs] I've some experience dealing with pr departments, and Matt was able to offer a view of the other side.  

Take aways:

• be honest when dealing with PR firms
• don't be a dick and remember that pr people are people too
• be able to articulate what you're looking for and how working with you is in the company's best interests
• look at dealing with a pr department as a relationship that could and should extend past just one article

Title: New Media Panel Discussion
Speakers: Bryan Murley, Jacques Poitras, Mathew Ingram, Matt Frehner, Jeffery Simpson

Summary:  Even before the new media panel started we were trying to pin down exactly what new media meant.  Does having a blog make me a new media outlet?  If The National Post has a Twitter account are they now new media?  With so many people on the panel there was no real preparation beyond the initial discussion.  I also don't know if we accomplished much during the session apart from pointing out that most "old media" still doesn't understand the internet though we did not really have any specific ideas for how to make money from being online.  I think my role on the panel was to argue that as exciting, and useful, as tools like Twitter and Facebook can be they're not exactly reinventing the wheel.  The standard rules of how to conduct yourself still apply.

Take aways:

• build your own personal brand so that you can bring your Twitter, Facebook followers with you to where ever your work is
• don't Tweet drunk
• ummm...

Update: Bryan Murley provides a much better re-cap of this panel on his own blog [iicm] that is not coloured by my own views on new media nor my stage fright.

 Title: Freelancing and finding a job panel
Speakers: Karen Unland, Erin Millar, Nick Taylor-Vaisey, McMillan Elizabeth, Iain Ilich, Jeffery Simpson

Summary: I think at some point this was a panel on freelancing and then it turned into how to parlay a freelancing gig into a job.  That worked for people like Iain Ilich who parlayed a freelancing career into a full time post with The Edmonton Journal, but it wasn't a particularly good fit for me who has parlayed a side-career in freelancing into a side-career in freelancing.  Apart from a few jokes about selling organs on the black market and working in my kitchen, I actually learned more about freelancing than I think I taught.  

Take aways:

• file on time
• check a publication's articles against its masthead to see how much of the content is written by freelancers versus staff writers
• network
• be reliable and easy to work with for the editors
• proof read your own work

The Jeffery Simpson World Tour 2010: Whereby the world is defined as Edmonton

     

ive and on stage you can see me doing the public speaking thing that I used to win awards for back when I was in grade four and five.  Granted my voice has broken and I've gone through puberty since then so I will warn you that it's not quite as melodious as it once was nor will I have a graphic of the human heart to refer you to.  However I will probably have had my hair cut before then, at least if Lydia has her way.  So that should add some kind of fashion flash to the proceedings.  No graphs though.  Sorry.

What will I be talking about?  How much are tickets?  Will there be punch and pie?  Are there any audience participation chants or songs that will be needed?

To go you'll need to register at a Canadian college or university and quickly get a job at the student newspaper before this weekend because I'll be talking at the Canadian University Press's 72nd annual conference this year titled Natural Selection [cup].  I'm actually doing a few sessions, to help justify the cost of them flying me out there.  The first one, and main one, I'll be talking with Matt Attwood who works in Bioware's [wp] media relations department on tech writing and how to work with PR departments of tech companies.  Next I'll be on a panel discussing new media with Matt Frehner, Matthew Ingram, Bryan Murley and hosted by CUP's Chris Berube.

This is the panel that a fist fight is most likely to break out in, since I tend to be a bit crotchety about the term "new media" and the idea that "old media" is dying.  Newspapers might be dying, but I don't think that's what people mean by "old media". 

The next day I'll be a part of a panel discussing freelance writing with Iain Ilich, Erin Millar, Elizabeth McMillan, Karen Unland hosted by Nick Taylor-Vaisey.

These are all names that I'm going to have to Google in the next day or so. 

Meanwhile I've come down with the sort of head cold that used to kill people back in the middle ages.  It essentially feels as though someone has stuffed my head full of phlegm and at night it starts leaking out my nose.  It's quite a mess.  Of course given that I'll be exposed to CUP Conference SARS this weekend probably means that I should work on my will.  A combination of head cold and whatever ailments a few hundred university students fighting their livers with weapons of mass intoxication are carrying will be a most interesting experience.

Now if you'll excuse me, my face is leaking.

The Georgia Straight geek gift guide is online

 

The Georgia Straight's "Geek Gift Guide" written by yours truly is up online now [tgs].  It's a pretty good collection of some of the coolest gadget gifts that you can get this Christmas.  I was pretty happy that the Kindle was able to make an appearance, since I was going to go with the Sony eReader instead since Amazon's device was not available in Canada until a few days before the article was due.  There was also a really cool set of Sony Ericsson headphones that I ended up leaving off the list because I could not find them for sale anywhere in Vancouver and Sony Ericsson would not get back to me with where one would buy them in Canada.

The Canon PowerShot S90 is especially tasty looking.

Also for the record the Teddy Ruxpin reference was in there before 30 Rock made a Teddy Ruxpin joke in their last episode.

Techvibes

I'm doing some writing for Techvibes, a technology blog that's based in Vancouver but covers most of the continent and a few places beyond.  My first post is about a new iPhone application that helps users pick out outfits to wear based on what they have in the closet, and it's online now [tv].

The Kindle and some tech writing

It seems like since I've gotten back from my honeymoon I've been kind of on the ropes and running behind on everything.  I picked up swine flu somewhere in Maine on our trip and was incredibly sick when we returned.  However having missed two weeks of work already for the trip I headed back, only to pass the flu onto at least one of my co-workers and possibly two.  After a few days, and a definitive doctor's diagnosis of H1N1 [wp] I ended up back at home for nearly another week.

I was just over that and back to work when I got the news about David [jks], and so blogging has certainly not been my top priority.  Add to that two articles that I've finished off for The Georgia Straight, and I actually don't feel bad about ignoring this blog.  Besides apart from an accounting of the honeymoon I've not had much to write about up until recently.  Ironically when I have blogged it's been for the Straight and that has been about the new Kindle I got for my birthday [tgs].

Well actually I combined a few of my gifts into the Kindle, using the money my parents and my brother gave me to order it from Amazon.  Since the Kindle was only available in America when I bought it I had to get it sent to a business in Sumas that specializes in receiving packages for Canadians.  Since then the Kindle has begun shipping to Canada [tgs], though I've heard that it does not have the web browser.

I've also blogged about Indigo/Chapters' moves into the ebook market [tgs] for the Straight. While I was on my honeymoon my article on Facebook games for The Georgia Straight as well [tgs].

I'm also likely going to be speaking at the 72nd annual Canadian University Press (CUP) National Conference in Edmonton this January.  It's being hosted by the University of Alberta student paper The Gateway, where a number of my closest CUP friends worked at, and though it's been awhile since I've been to a CUP conference it should be fun.  I've not gotten all the details nailed down, but I appear to be listed as a speaker [cup] so that's always a good sign.  The last CUP conference I spoke at ended up with me writing for the Straight, so hopefully this will also be a good networking opportunity.

Vancouver internet start-ups in The Georgia Straight

One of the things I told students at the Canadian University Press conference

that I spoke at was to always take any assignment offered [jks].  The life of a freelance writer is such that we really never know what will be our last job, and saying no to work is always a risk especially when you're trying to build a relationship with a publication.  While I've been writing for The Georgia Straightfor over a year the spacing between each article is long enough that I'm always a little concerned that maybe they'll forget about me.  The technology section only really has one regular writer (Blaine Kyllo) and having heard enough stories about freelancers who said no to one job and had publications just assume that they were no longer interested in writing, I pretty much say yes to anything and everything. 

Looking back on it I probably should have said no to an article being due just over a week after my wedding.  However I had been pitching the story since I first started writing for the Straightand it was the fall technology issue so it was hard to say no.  I also completely underestimated how much work a wedding was, and moving my wife into my apartment would be.  Which is a long way of being honest and saying that tech editor Stephen Hui had to do a lot more on this one than normal and so while I think the interviews went well the structure of the article is mostly thanks to Stephen, in however good it is.  Anything wrong with it is my fault.

The article is in the Straighttoday and on-line [tgs].  It turned out well in the end though I think if I ever do my song and dance for mold-able minds, I'll ad weddings as an exception of a time when begging off an assignment is probably a good idea. 

A last note about the article that

I feel I should mention is that I did a lot of interviews with people that did not make it into the finished article.  It turned out that I just had too much material and given that it takes at least 100-300 words to introduce and give details about a start-up company, some of the ones I spoke with had to be left out in order to keep in the assigned space.  Those interviews however aren't going to be lost, and I'll be turning them into short pieces for The Georgia Straight's website's tech section [tgs] over the next week or two. 

The best camera is the one you have with you

At the start of this summer I sold my old Canon Rebel and bought a new X1i so that I could add video to my DSLR.  The trouble is with my big camera, as I call it even though it's not that big, is that I just do not carry it around as much as I should.  Even a trip to the Richmond Night Market which is normally a great place to take pictures I've left it at home.  Thankfully the camera in my new iPhone 3GS is actually really good.  I've used camera phones with much higher megapixel ratings, but for some reason the iPhone's pictures tend to trump even the Nokia N95 5MP camera-phone I was using.

The saying is that the best camera is the one that you have on you, and I feel like the iPhone is a very good fall back camera.  Granted it's not yet ready to be the camera that I take to Whitecaps games or the one I want to pull out when I need a really good optical zoom.  However I think it can capture the events of day to day quite well.

I'd definitely hold up the picture above, taken at the Night Market with my iPhone, with anything that I've taken with an slr or dslr there.  The fact that it's small, not too conspicuous and always on me makes it actually fairly great.

My article on open social networks appears in The Georgia Straight

My latest article is in this week's The Georgia Straight in all the finest newspaper boxes around Vancouver and on-line [tgs].  This one was a bit trickier to get my head around, because while I know what "open" means when it comes to having social networks like Twitter, Facebook and the like be more open not everyone agrees what that means.  For some people it's part of a larger view that all information should be open, while to others it's a call for users to actually have more control over their data and privacy than they do now.

So some people are for more privacy, others are for less, and yet they're all on the same side.

The other issue was that it's hard to get the other side of the argument.  Facebook never got back to me, and nobody is going to really stand up for less openness and user control over data but yet there may be legitimate reasons that it's necessary sometimes.  These might not be the strongest reasons, but it's a bit hard to look at an issue objectively when one side really won't talk.

I'm happy with how the article ended up though, and it's a case where it was nice to have an edit on it to help focus it a bit and make sure that I was making sense to anyone aside from myself.

Try everything twice

I've been bad at blogging recently.  Basically I tend to just use this site to announce new blog projects which I never follow through on.  Life is just kind of hectic these days as we move ever closer to the August 9th wedding date.  However I have been doing a Tumblr page, which is kind of a cross between blogging and Tweeting.  It's the new hotness.  

Check out Try Everthing Twice, the Tumblr site where my rather limited internet activity will be appearing.

The iPhone's remote wipe

A nice feature of the iPhone's 3.0 OS that works well with Apple's Mobile Me service is the Find My iPhone feature.  The one drawback with it is that it only works when the phone is actually connected to the network.  So when my phone was stolen on the weekend I was able to track if for a bit, but my attempts to telephone and text the thief to encourage him to return it ended just prompting him to turn the phone off.

Apart from tracking the Find My iPhone feature of Mobile Me allows for a remote wipe of the iPhone.  So given that there is a good deal of personal data on my device, since it was in effect my main computer, I activated it once the phone went off the grid.  Better to erase everything on the phone than to let my personal data get used by the thief who had stolen the phone.

A feature that would be nice would be a method of completely disable the phone until it was plugged back into your own specific version of iTunes.  That way the thief who stole it would have no way of profiting from selling it on Craigslist.  Perhaps it could just lock the phone up with a message on the screen that read something like, "This phone is stolen.  If found please call xxx-xxx-xxxx."

Still it's good to know that whomever stole my iPhone won't be able to be Twittering under my name.

Like the tracking the wipe requires the device to log into the service, and so up until last night it was still pending.  Around midnight I received the following email, confirming that my data was being erased:

Dear MobileMe member,  The remote wipe of Jeffery Simpson’s iPhone requested at 6:37 PM on July 10, 2009 began at 12:29 AM on July 14, 2009. All media, data, and settings are being permanently erased from Jeffery Simpson’s iPhone. This process may take up to two hours, depending on your device. Please note this process cannot be cancelled.  If you retrieve your device after completing a remote wipe, you can connect it to your computer and use iTunes to restore it to a previous backup. If you were previously syncing with MobileMe, you can re-enter your MobileMe settings on your device to immediately restore email, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks.  If your iPhone has been lost or stolen, be sure to contact your carrier to suspend your wireless service.

iPhone last seen wearing black case

My iPhone was stolen from work today.  A pessimist would say that the loss of the phone is akin to losing about $700 right around the time that I'm having to co-fund a wedding with Lydia, her parents and mine.  An optimist would say that it was a perfect excuse to get a new iPhone 3GS with twice the memory.

It's a good thing I'm an optimist.

For now I'm back to using my iPod classic which is pictured here acting as my portable recording studio.  These days it's mostly used to record the interviews I do for The Georgia Straight's tech section [tgs].  I'll have another article appearing next week, which along with my GST check and a $100 gift card I won at work might help fund my iPhone upgrade.

Until Monday I probably won't be able to be reached by phone.  If you leave me a message I'll be able to check it and get back to you when I can.  Having no landline in my apartment it means that I'll be kind of cut off for the next little bit.

My new Georgia Straight article on geotagging is out

My latest, and last assigned, article for The Georgia Straight is running in this week's issue so if you're around Vancouver you can pick it up.  This article is about geotagging photos, which I got really excited by but kind of discovered that it's not quite ready for prime time.  It's really cool to have the geotagging information added automatically when I take a picture with my iPhone, but until it's seamless to put the same information onto photos taken with my other cameras I can't see it being something I do regularly. 

I used to use Flickr's map to drag photos around to position them, but now I'm so far behind on keeping up with that task that it's obvious that I'm never going to be able to finish.  For every photograph I position on the map I take twenty more.

The newest version of iPhoto, which just came out yesterday, adds a lot of geotagging functionality in it but again there's no easy way to get the information into the photos.  I think it's maybe a year or two off before somebody, maybe even Apple, figures out a good and painless way of doing it or GPS devices are built into every camera so that it's done automatically.

If you're not in the Lower Mainland and don't see The Straight on every street corner then you can head over to their website to read the article here [tgs]. 

Don't worry, there will be more articles on the way I just need to get a few new assignments with the paper.

Live blogging is kind of like live novel writing

Live blogging is kind of a weird duck. I regularly read the minute-by-minute match reports for overseas Premier League Football matches from The Guardian's website [tg] and it's increasingly gaining popularity in regards to covering technology conferences. People regularly live blog Steve Jobs' keynotes now, and even local tech talks get live blogged.

It's a mixture of live radio coverage, play-by-play and live novel writing. What's live novel writing? Glad you asked.

My article on virtual worlds is in The Georgia Straight

The article I wrote for The Georgia Straight on virtual worlds, most notably Second Life, is in today's issue and online [tgs].  Because of the backlog of tech reporting the Straight currently has one of the virtual worlds I wrote about, Google's Lively, has actually closed down since I submitted the piece. 

The closure lends some weight to a blog post I wrote for the Straight earlier this month about Pownce closing, and how it's important to keep local backups of anything you store in the internet cloud but want to know is safe [tgs].

You can hardly tell I made it on a cell phone

I was thinking about the video I posted awhile ago of Louis CK talking about the technological advances we all take for granted [jks] when I realized that I'd once made an entire video on my old cell phone. That's right my old cell phone. My first cell phone made telephone calls, and if you threw it at a raccoon hard enough could probably stun a raccoon but that's about it.

Article on Chuck Fipke in Wired

As part of my new non-paying gig blogging for The Georgia Straight's tech blog [gs] I've been reading Wired a lot more than I normally do, as I try to come up with new topics to blog about.  When I was scanning articles in their last issue I came across one that caught my eye with the title "How a Rogue Geologist Discovered a Diamond Trove in the Canadian Arctic" [wm].

"Hey," I thought to myself, "I (sort of) know someone who discovered diamonds in Canada maybe the article will mention him."

Not only does Chuck Fipke get mentioned, the feature length article is about him.  When we moved back to Kelowna from White Rock we moved just down the street from the Fipkes, and Ryan was in my grade in school.  We were in the same class in at least one year of grades 5, 6 and 7 and I know I slept over at least once.  We also played road hockey a bit.  During that time finding diamonds in Canada's north was not yet a reality, and the family was well off.  After I went to a different high school than Ryan the diamonds were found and from then it always seemed like things changed for the family.

I actually didn't see Ryan after grade school, so it wasn't like we were particularly close friends.  Seeing as Kelowna's a small town, and rumors and the like spread and grow like wildfire it's hard to tell how many of the stories about the kind of money, and spending, that the family has has seen since the diamonds were discovered are true and how many are just complete tall tales.  But then again Chuck Fipke's $200 million dollar divorce was the largest in Canadian history.

The best part of the article is: "We are ushered past the velvet rope at the Cheetah Lounge, Kelowna's classiest strip joint, and Captain Chaos orders another round of caipirinhas for everyone."

Okay, I realize that the writer probably hasn't been to Kelowna before, but unless it's changed recently there's only two strip clubs in Kelowna and it's probably more accurate to say that Cheetahs is the least skeevy of the two.

Classy?  Erm no.

Image from Wired's article.

I'm now Web 2.0 Complient

Thanks to the Web 2.0 Logo generator [wlc] for my new online identity. I'm dropping the vowels and adding meta-data to my person to be fully Web 2.0 ready. I'll be capturing data driven wikis all night long.

In the classroom they have wi-fi

I guess it dates me to say that when I was in high school nobody brought laptops to school. When I got a very old Powerbook to take with me to France, and would use take it in class on my return to Canada, it was a novelty. Even when I hit university the only other students using laptops tended to be the special needs students who the school supplied with computers to aid in their studies. There certainly was not wi-fi available anywhere around campus, and if I wanted to get my laptop online I needed to unplug one of the computers in the Phoenix's office and stick the stolen ethernet cable into my computer.

By the time I left it was more common to see laptops, but university wide wi-fi was still in the future. In the newspaper office we'd finally set up our own private wireless network, simply because we were always short on ethernet ports, and that seemed cutting edge.

These days though wireless internet is the norm in post-secondary schools across Canada. Karen Pinchin wrote an article for The Georgia Straight about how that's taxing student's attention spans in class [tgs], and I guess the fact that I'm blogging as the teacher is trying to get his laptop to display the correct slide, is proof that it does divide attention. Myself though I'm of the opinion that students basically find ways to let their minds go on mini holidays with or without technological advances.

I was generally attentive in high school but when the teacher was having to go over a concept for a third or fourth time for someone my mind would wander. Back then I'd write short stories, work on terrible lyrics to terrible songs that I intended to write one day when I finally learned to play guitar (I never did and likely never will), or came up with names for the terrible band that would never perform my terrible songs.

On notable class was grade eight English. I was an avid reader and would generally finish a novel within a week, which since we studied a novel over a month or two, meant that I had a great deal of time during the class' reading time. Seeing this, and seeing that Curtis Seaman was also reading ahead, Mr. Brooks would send the pair of us out to wander the school and write short stories and plays for extra credit. This never resulted in any great pieces of literature, since they were generally very silly parodies that only really made us laugh.

Still it was the type of thing that made us really enjoy the class, and I think that year was probably the best mark I ever got in English.

So here I am blogging. The projector is almost fixed, and the class is ready to continue so I guess I'd better go. I probably won't get extra credit for this, but at least I'm not unleashing more terrible lyrics to terrible songs to a yet unformed terrible band out into the world.

Vancouver bloggers in print

My most recent article appeared in The Georgia Straight today [tgs] in one of the paper's regular tech focused issues.  I'd mentioned this article awhile ago [jks] when I was talking about advertising on blogs, a subject I am still thinking over.  That part, the role of advertising on blogs, did not really get touched on with the exception of a few words during the interviews but it really did not fit into the article as a whole.

This is the first article that I've done for The Straight that's had a photo run with it.  That photo, which is to the right, was taken by the technology editor Stephen Hui and of the bloggers interviewed he went with a photo of Jeannette Ordas who blogs at Everybody Likes Sandwiches [els], a food blog that Lydia is into.

If you're in Vancouver then pick up a copy of the article on almost any street corner.  The paper's free so you've got no excuses.  If you're not in the lower mainland you'll find a link in the first sentence of this post that will take you right to it's online version.

So far the feedback has been mostly positive.  As always though these sorts of articles are by their very nature incomplete.  I'm sure there's a few dozen other worthy local bloggers around town who deserve a mention, and at least one reason that Vancouver is such a blog-centric city that I didn't touch on.

How to survive my lull in blogging

looking at the incoming links over at Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv] I noticed one from The Province, one of the main newspapers here in Vancouver.  Taking a look at the incoming link I couldn't find anything, but when I did a site search for "Metroblogging" I came up with quite a few times where they've quoted from the Vancouver based blog.  Indeed these quotes go back at least since last year, and since I've never discovered it before today it suggests that we don't get much in the way of traffic from links off of the newspaper's site.

Now I'm pretty sure these quotes were just on the website, and not in the physical paper.

Subjects that I've been quoted on:

• About Robert Pickton [tp]
• About what the nicest McDonald's in the Lower Mainland is [tp]
• The Spice Girls in Vancouver [tp]

Meanwhile I've been blogging over at Metroblogging Vancouver, and a few of those are worth checking out. What should you be reading over there during my blogging lull here?  Well check these out:

• The Canucks win the Stanley Cup [mbv]
• "We Are All Canucks" more than just branding [mbv]
• The Vancouver Sun knows the internets [mbv]

Lastly I thought I'd repost links to my two articles in The Georgia Straight for those who may have missed it:

• Twitter [tgs]
• Location aware social services (Loopt & Brightkite) [tgs]