Quoderat

The thing about creativity …

david — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:16:12 +0000

I left this comment on Simon St-Laurent’s interesting and thoughtful post How dare Apple … (which, in turn, was partly a response to Tim Bray’s post Nothing Creative).

I don’t believe that most things, including the iPad, are obviously right or wrong, but I do have serious concerns that go beyond simply not being able to code on an iPad (at least, until there’s an app for that). I’m copying my comment here to give it a more permanent home. If I hadn’t posted this yet, I’d edit it to tone down the emotional language 10% or so, but still, it’s a fair reflection of my thoughts and concerns, not about the iPad itself (it’s just another consumer device), but about the way people are starting to talk and think about issues that are very important to me, like software freedom:

The thing about creativity is that it responds poorly to central planning and central control. I have no problem with the fact that the iPad isn’t developer-friendly — I can buy a Netbook with twice the power for half the price and code on it (and, BTW, that netbook makes just as simple a consumer device).

My problem is the idea that a single Apple politburo controls everything that can appear on the device. Is that the future? Even in the bad old days of TV, before cable, there were 3 1/2 US networks to choose from, not just one - you had to watch TV outside the US to see just how bad things could get with a single, government-controlled broadcaster (I grew up in Canada, but close enough to watch the US stations, thank god).

Apple’s obsession with central control goes beyond software to hardware. There must be some kind of port for the optional keyboard to plug into, but no way it’s going to be USB or Firewire, because that might let someone use an *unplanned* creative device on the iPad, someone creative daring not to give Apple its cut (and veto). If I build something clever for creative people using a USB interface, it will work with desktop towers, notebooks, netbooks, and even some small portable devices, but *not* with the iPad.

Apple has some smart people working there, but they won’t always have the best ideas, and Apple has thrown up too many barriers to other people with smart ideas. The best apps in the future are going to come from a couple of students coding in a dorm room, and they might just be so annoyed by Apple censorship that they defect to a freer platform. It’s sad that things have gotten to the point that even Windows is a freer platform than Apple.

What’s the value of a life?

david — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 18:10:29 +0000

What’s your life worth to you? “Priceless” is the obvious answer, but in reality, you put a price on your life all the time.

Safety vs. money

Here’s a simple example: let’s say that you want to go on a two-hour scheduled flight, and that the odds of you dying on the flight come out to about 1 in 1 million (it’s actually lower, but let’s keep the math simple). Your ticket costs $400 with taxes.

Now, I start an airline that adds all kinds of extra safety features and procedures, and over the years, it proves itself twice as safe as the average, so your odds of dying are only 1 in 2 million. However, your ticket would cost $600 with taxes on my airline.

Will you buy the more expensive ticket? If not, then you’ve decided that your life is worth less than $200 million dollars (for every million people who paid the extra $200, one would be saved from death, in the unlikely event that I managed to get the simple math right) — a big number, still, but no longer “priceless”. Decide how much extra you would pay for the ticket ($5? $10? $50?) and multiply by 1 million — that’s what your life’s worth to you.

Safety vs. time and pleasure

Of course, time is as much of a commodity as money. How much time do you save by flying between cities instead of taking the train, or driving across town instead of taking the bus? How much extra risk of death did you assume by making that choice? Again, you can do the math, and decide what value (in saved time) you put on your life. Ditto for your hobbies — downhill skiing is more dangerous than playing Wii, but you’ve decided that the value of your life is less than the extra enjoyment divided by the extra risk of dying (where risk is < 1.0).

It’s perfectly normal

Risk taking is normal for humans, and most of the time we don’t actually do the math — we just make a snap judgement of the value of our lives and the effects of our choices based on instinct. This matters, though, because we (where “we” = American, Canadian, British, Australian, etc) are now electing governments that promise to spend more money to make us safer, and much of that money ends up going into blowing up central Asian villages, spying on our communications, and groping us at airports.

Valuing lives

Is it helping? If we’d spent the same amount of money building better flu clinics, fast intercity trains or even better-lit intersections, could we have saved more lives in our own countries? If we’d invested even one percent of that money into sewers, clean water or earthquake-resistant hospitals for the developing world, how many lives could we have saved there?

Putting a dollar value on a life isn’t a crass, corporate, conservative thing — it’s a way of deciding where to spend money most effectively. If I could save one life for every $2 million spent on road improvements, and one life for every $200 million spent on improved airport security, where should I spend that money?

Where are people dying?

Let’s end with fatality numbers for the U.S. in 2001, the worst year for terrorism on U.S. soil:

Influenza and pneumonia: 63,730

Traffic accidents: 42,196

Terrorist attacks: 2,973

If you’d had billions of dollars to spend to save lives nine years ago, where would you have spent it first? Where would you spend it now? That depends not only on the overall numbers, of course, but the amount you have to spend to save each life. I’m not sure we know that, but I suspect that it’s much higher for anti-terrorism efforts than for basic road or healthcare improvements.

One app store to rule them all …

david — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 22:01:54 +0000

During my university studies, I first encountered the idea of the Myth of Progress — in 19th and 20th centuries a lot of people assumed that the world generally gets better each generation (aside from occasional blips like depressions or world wars), with less bigotry, better medicine, new technology, etc., but there’s no guarantee that any next generation will build on and improve the accomplishments of the previous one, and history’s movement may be more akin to a random walk.

Case in point: in the information technology world, the greatest accomplishment of the most talented coders and business people in GenX was replacing the Baby Boomers’ nasty old platform-dependent shrink-wrapped computer applications with open web applications that could run anywhere, from a Windows desktop to a Linux cell phone. Write once, run all over the place on any hardware/OS you want. GMail instead of Eudora. Wikipedia instead of Encarta. Cool, eh?

So GenY comes along and says “hey: instead of encouraging people to browse the web with open standards, let’s build proprietary applications that run on only one type of mobile phone. And we’ll allow only one store to sell those applications for each type of phone, and every proprietary, platform-specific app will have to be preapproved and precensored by the phone manufacturer, who will extort^H^H^H^H^H^H be gladly offered a cut of sales.” Even Microsoft in its monopolistic hey-day — before it became the toothless lion it is today — never had the balls to try anything like that with Windows apps.

Who, ten years ago, would have predicted an IT catastrophe like this after so much progress and hope? It’s enough to make a person cry. Let’s encourage those GenY’ers who taken up the torch and continue to work on the dream of an open web.

A farewell to tabs

david — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:32:12 +0000

I’ve used tabbed layouts in web sites for a while without thinking much about it. I find them less obtrusive than menus, and have always believed that the idiom was familiar to nearly all users because of desktop applications. Here’s an example of the tabbed interface at OurAirports as of 5 August, 2009:

The “Airport” tab has bold text, and a white background that runs smoothly into the rest of the page, while the other tabs have a light-blue background, blue text, and a line at the bottom separating them from the page — that should make it obvious to everyone that “Airport” represents the current page, while the others represent alternative pages that you can view by clicking on them.

Right?

Err, maybe not. Even though it doesn’t look linky, the active tab is still, by a lucky coincidence, a link, so I was able to track it using the Google Analytics Site Overlay out-link tracker (note that it’s not actually a click tracker, even if it looks like one). I have over 40,000 airport pages like this, so I can’t check every one, but the few dozen I looked at all told the same, sad story…

People don’t get tabbed interfaces

On most airport pages, the majority of user clicks were on the active “Airport” tab. In other words, people go to the page, see the word “Airport” in bold in a prominent position, and click on it. They don’t notice that it’s the active tab — maybe they don’t know that it’s a tab at all. They just figure that it must have more information about the airport they’re looking at.

For example, on the Heathrow Airport page over the past month, Google Analytics tracked 17 outlinks to the same page (via the active “Airport” tab), 5 to airport arrivals, 4 to airport departures, and 0-2 for every other link.

Once they click on what I thought they’d recognize as the active airport tab, the same page just reloads. Blech. I assume that’s when they get sick of the site, and go back to their Google search results to find a better page about the airport.

Tabs encourage information clutter

So the tabbed interface just leads to confusion and frustration from many of the visitors to my web site. But there’s another problem evident from the the outlink stats: tabs encourage a designer to present too many options in too many contexts. The tabs are all visible on every page they cover, but most of the time, they represent information that the users don’t actually need, and there’s no clear visual cue that some of the tabs (e.g. arrivals and departures) are a lot more interesting than others (e.g. the airport page’s change history).

Here, for example, are the last month’s outlink counts for each of the tabs on the Myrtle Beach International Airport page:

Tab	# followed
Airport	33
Arrivals	36
Departures	12
Pilot info	0
Visitors	4
Nearby airports	7
Nearby members	1
Changes	0
Edit	0

For reasons I don’t understand, this was the most-visited airport page on OurAirports last month, with 371 pageviews (300 uniques). It’s a little atypical, in that the active tab is not the most clicked (though it’s still unacceptably high), but otherwise, it shows the picture well. The “Pilot info” tab has existed for only a few days, so we can leave it out, but in general, it’s clear that the main thing accomplished by the tabs is showing a lot of links at the top of every page that no one actually wants to use. I suspect that even the four clicks on the “Visitors” tab were accidental — instead of trying to see what OurAirports members have visited the airport, people were probably just looking for visitor information.

How to redesign?

So if (a) tabs aren’t actually intuitive for most of my visitors, and (b) they fail to distinguish useful/popular information from more esoteric information, then they have to go. It’s going to take me a while to redesign the site, but what I think I’ll do is highlight the 3-5 most useful actions for each type of page in a side bar beside the map, like this:

Show me…

arrivals or departures

visitor comments

pilot information

nearby airports

points of interest

more…

A list like this, as opposed to tabs, provides a clear call to action for a page visitor, providing more detailed options in language that will make sense to them. It highlights useful information they might have missed in a tab (e.g. pilot info) or a section lower on the page (e.g. Visitor comments), and hides stuff they rarely need in a menu that appears only on demand, when they click “More…”.

Farewell, tabs. Even if you weren’t helpful, you were fun to design with CSS and rounded-corner images.

Lessons about web sites for mobile browsers

david — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:34:54 +0000

Working on ourairports.mobi, the mobile version of OurAirports, I’m getting a crash course in writing for mobile browsers. Here, in no particular order, are some of my lessons:

The OpenWave browser is horrendous, ignoring character encoding, randomly skipping some simple CSS, etc., but it’s one of the most common on small cell phones, so you have to live with it.
Some Nokia browsers will accept a 302 redirect but consider a 303 to be an HTTP error.
Cell phone browsers all seem to display the title element at the top of the screen, so if you have the same text in title and h1, it will appear twice, probably filling the whole first page. If I leave it out, though, what happens on bigger screens like the iPhone or Blackberry?
Breadcrumbs are a bad idea for mobile pages, because they use a lot of screen real-estate on a cell phone. I might move mine to the bottom.
Making too many things into links is a bad idea, because it takes a long time to scroll though them.
Even small graphics take a long time to load. If there’s no good reason, don’t make people download any. Including your corporate logo is not a good reason. Use colors instead of graphics when you can.
OpenWave (and, I assume, other browsers) do not choose intelligent default font sizes for h1, etc. — they’ll fill the whole screen if you don’t change them with CSS.
When only a couple of dozen words fit on a screen at once, verbosity is a bad thing. Ask yourself “can I say it with fewer words”? Then do the same thing four or five times more. I’m still working on that.
Short previews are a good idea for things like comment lists, to save scrolling time. Leave out as much as possible (for example, I don’t give the date of a comment unless the user views the full comment).
Always including “jump to” links at the top of every page to save scrolling.
Extra stuff you’d normally put at the top of a web page, like a search box, login info, home link, etc., belongs at the bottom of a mobile web page, so that users don’t have to scroll past it to get to the content.

I’ll add more as I discover it.

Costing out Google App Engine

david — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 17:02:27 +0000

The Google App Engine (GAE) is the newest of the major cloud computing platforms for hosting web applications. I’ve been experimenting with it for a couple of days, and will post my impressions later. For now, I thought it might be interesting to try to make sense of the pricing.

Unlike many of the other platforms, GAE starts out free. Only when you pass the built-in quotas do you start paying for infrastructure usage.

Google has designed its free quotas to allow approximately 5 million pageviews per month. Before we look at what Google charges for passing that limit, let’s look at this number from a business perspective. (Obviously, it will vary wildly depending on what a site does: a well-designed, read-intensive site might be able to get 10 million pageviews or more without passing the quota, while a poorly-designed, write-intensive site might struggle to fit in 1 million. We’ll just stick with Google’s estimate for now.)

Free quotas and the boutique web site

There are many ways for web sites to earn money, and some (such as membership fees) don’t correlate directly with pageviews. Let’s assume, though, that like most web sites, yours is advertiser-supported. In that case, the most important number to you is your eCPM (effective cost per mille), the mean revenue you earn for every 1,000 pageviews. Some people claim very high numbers for this, like $20 eCPM, but they’re usually talking about either a low-traffic site, or what they get for a few premium direct ad sales before they splatter the rest of their pages with low-paying filler from ad networks. When you average everything out, stick with sites with monthly pageviews in the millions, and consider all pageviews rather than just premium ad sales, about $0.50-$2.50 eCPM seems like a typical revenue range from my experience consulting with big and small companies.

A web site receiving 5 million pageviews/month, then, with ads on all the pages, would be earning ad revenue of $2,500–$12,500/month, or $30,000–$150,000/year. Google has obviously chosen its free-quota cutoff carefully: that’s enough to support one person working on a boutique web site, or maybe two people working on the site part time, but not enough to support even a small company with employees, rent, etc.

Still, why is Google offering this for free while Amazon, for example, isn’t? It’s the ad revenue.

Google runs what is by far the most popular web site ad network, so the odds are that most web sites on GAE will also be running Google ads. Since Google keeps about 25% of ad revenue (at least back in 2006), a site hosted on Google App Engine for free, bringing in $75,000/year for the site owner in revenue from Google ads, likely generates about a $25,000/year ad commission for Google. If AWS allowed a similar free quota, all they’d do is generate $25,000/year for Google as well, not for themselves.

Paid usage and the professional web site

Once your site grows beyond that target, Google wants you to pay. You still get the free quota every month first, so if you’re getting only (say) 7 or 8 million pageviews/month, and they’re evenly-distributed, you won’t be paying very much at all. Let’s say, though, that you are extremely and atypically successful, and your site has grown to tens or hundreds of millions of pageviews, so that the free quotas become insignificant. Here’s what you’ll be paying as of 18 July 2009 (I’ve added the free quotas for comparison):

Item	Unit	Cost	Free quota
CPU time	hour	$0.10	6.5
Bandwidth out	gigabyte	$0.12	1
Bandwidth in	gigabyte	$0.10	1
Stored data	gigabyte/day	$0.005	1
Recipients e-mailed	E-mails	$0.0001	2000

Since we know the unit cost and the free quotas, we can calculate the value of the free quotas:

Item	Unit	Cost	Free quota	Daily value	Monthly value
CPU time	hour	$0.10	6.5	$0.65	$19.77
Bandwidth out	gigabyte	$0.12	1	$0.12	$3.65
Bandwidth in	gigabyte	$0.10	1	$0.10	$3.04
Stored data	gigabyte/day	$0.005	1	$0.01	$0.15
Recipients e-mailed	E-mails	$0.0001	2000	$0.20	$6.08
Total				$1.08	$32.70

So the free quotas are worth US $32.70/month, and Google estimates that they can cover 5 million pageviews per month. Let’s put those two numbers together:

$32.70 / 5,000,000 * 1,000 =~ $0.0065

In other words, if your site has the average resource usage Googe expects, the infrastructure cost of hosting on GAE is about two thirds of a cent for every 1,000 pageviews.

Yikes!

Even if that’s wrong by an order of magnitude, you’d still be looking at under $0.07 per thousand pageviews. If you’re running Google ads on your pages at all, you’re probably making at least $0.50 eCPM, and likely closer to $1.00. Google has, effectively, taken infrastructure costs right out of the equation for ad-supported sites.

Other issues

Of course, that doesn’t mean that you’ll make much money — it’s surprisingly hard to get a site up to even 100,000 pageviews/month, much less millions (and $100/month in ad revenue isn’t going to pay your rent) — but at least you’ll be spending your time worrying about the content and usability of your site, rather than the infrastructure, like most startups do.

Still, GAE isn’t necessarily the best choice, yet. I’ve spent a couple of days experimenting with GAE to see if it can support my OurAirports web site (75,000 pageviews/month), with mixed results. Because GAE has to operate transparently in the GFS/BigTable cloud, its free or low price comes with a lot of constraints: the datastore is missing many basic features I rely on in a relational database (e.g. views, joins, ~~and referential integrity~~), there’s no local filesystem access, no threads, and extremely weak support for backend computation such as aggregating information or importing data.

It used to be that you could use any programming language you wanted on GAE, as long as it was Python. Now that GAE also supports a Java Virtual Machine (with some restrictions), you can run not only Java, but any JVM-based language such as JRuby (as long as it complies with GAE’s JVM restrictions), but you still can’t just dump a PHP app onto GAE and have it run: you’re basically going to have to rewrite the app from scratch.

There’s also the problem of putting your eggs in Google’s basket, so to speak — the 6+ hour outage last month made it clear that cloud computing doesn’t guarantee better uptime than a dedicated server. And if Google suddenly decides to increase their rates, it may be very difficult to move your code and data to a different site, unless you take very advanced precautions.

If you can live with the constraints, though, the pricing is certainly right.

Mixing GPL and non-GPL: a different perspective

david — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:49:17 +0000

Dual-licensing is a popular Open Source business model, especially using the (very restrictive) Gnu General Public License (GPL). Popular opinion, as reflected (for example) in the comments on this blog posting, says that it’s either forbidden or highly questionable to do things like linking non-GPL things with GPL things, so enterprises will have to buy a dual-licensed version (instead of using the free GPL version of the software) to take advantage of closed-source enterprise components.

The case of MariaDB

I wonder if popular opinion might be wrong.

Consider the GPL software package mentioned in the blog posting linked above: MariaDB, a fork of the Open Source MySQL database manager. Because the maintainers of MariaDB don’t own most of the copyrights on the code, they cannot dual-license it; as a result, some people believe that the GPL forbids using closed-source MySQL storage engines such as ScaleDB with MariaDB.

Distribution, not use

Unlike closed-source licenses, however, the GPL exists primarily to control how people distribute software packages, not how people use them. Section 0 of the GPL makes this fairly clear:

Section 0: “Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted…”

The non-normative FAQ for this version of the GPL goes even further, allowing private modification of a package outside the scope of the GPL as well:

A company is running a modified version of a GPL’ed program on a web site. Does the GPL say they must release their modified sources?

The GPL permits anyone to make a modified version and use it without ever distributing it to others. What this company is doing is a special case of that. Therefore, the company does not have to release the modified sources…

Non-GPL plugins and personal use

So, with that in mind, let’s start with the personal-use case. I have an unmodified GPL-licensed copy of MariaDB and a properly-licensed copy of ScaleDB. I do not need to modify anything in the MariaDB distribution to use ScaleDB — I just have to drop ScaleDB into the appropriate directory and edit my personal config files to tell MariaDB to use it. Since I’m just running MariaDB, not modifying it, am I even bound to accept the terms of the GPL? It doesn’t look like I am.

Non-GPL plugins and aggregation

Now, let’s take this a step further. What if distribute a DVD-ROM that happens to have both MariaDB and ScaleDB on it? I comply with the GPL for MariaDB (e.g. include a copy of the GPL and the MariaDB source code), and have permission from the copyright holder to include ScaleDB. There are no modifications to MariaDB at all, even in the configuation files: just two separate packages that happen to be stored in different directories on the same DVD-ROM. Am I in violation of the GPL now?

And what if I decide to add a script to automate configuring MariaDB to use ScaleDB as a third, independent software package? The script is an entirely separate piece of software, and includes no GPL code at all. I still don’t modify MariaDB or bundle ScaleDB with it in the same package, but I provide a tool that someone can use to do so (they could also use the tool if they obtained both packages from other sources). Now is there a GPL violation?

So I end up with a redistributable DVD-ROM that allows a user to install a GPL program with a closed-source, plug-in storage engine for private use, and I don’t think I’ve violated the GPL or even wandered into any grey areas. What does everyone else think?

ohare-airport.org link scam: phishing for pagerank

david — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:08:30 +0000

I discovered an interesting link scam in my inbox this morning, with the subject line “New Chicago O’Hare International Airport website”. The message informed me that Chicago O’Hare Airport has a new website at ohare-airport.org, and asked me to update my link to the airport. The link points to a pretty credible looking site, with arrivals and departures information, ground transportation, and even a privacy policy (!) The only clue that something’s wrong is the very vague copyright information (”© Airport Administration Services”) and the lack of a phone number or mailing address on the contact page.

I run a community airport website named OurAirports, so it’s not unusual for me to get e-mail from smaller airports and flying clubs with updates, but big airports have never bothered with me.

As one would expect, O’Hare Airport’s existing web site makes no mention of a new, updated site. In this scam the scammer is not phishing for personal information or trying to scam money, but instead, is trying to get pagerank over the official O’Hare site by tricking thousands of sites into providing links.

What are they looking for? Given that the e-mail traces back to a site called huntparking.com, I’ll guess that they want to use the web traffic either to sell ads for airport parking or to sell their own parking.

The e-mail and whois info are below. Nicely done, by the way — the fake site is much better designed than O’Hare’s real site, and even the markup snippet in the e-mail is XHTML-compatible. Perhaps O’Hare Airport should consider hiring the designer instead of bringing charges.

The message

Message-ID: 
From: "Chicago O'Hare Airport" 
To: [removed]
Subject: New Chicago O’Hare International Airport website
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset=”iso-8859-1″
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-Mailer: Microsoft Windows Mail 6.0.6001.18000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.0.6001.18049
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - host.huntparking.com
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - ourairports.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [47 12] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - ohare-airport.org

To whom it may concern:

We are proud to announce the launch of the new Chicago O’Hare =
International Airport website www.ohare-airport.org. It provides =
comprehensive real time flight information on arrivals, departures and =
delays, terminals and maps, parking, transportation, directions, food =
and shopping, hotels, etc.

If you find our website to be of value to you and your readers, we would =
appreciate it if you could add a link to us at your URL =
http://www.ourairports.com/airports/KORD/ where, in our opinion, it =
would be the most relevant.=20

Alternatively, you can utilize the customized link code provided below =
(just cut and paste):

Chicago O’Hare =
airport

If you have any questions, please, do not hesitate to contact us. Thank =
you for your time and consideration.

Kind regards,

Natalia Klimovich
Website Administrator
www.ohare-airport.org

Whois Information for ohare-airport.org

Domain ID:D155295366-LROR
Domain Name:OHARE-AIRPORT.ORG
Created On:07-Feb-2009 08:45:01 UTC
Last Updated On:09-Apr-2009 03:54:26 UTC
Expiration Date:07-Feb-2010 08:45:01 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:GoDaddy.com, Inc. (R91-LROR)
Status:CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT RENEW PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:GODA-059235088
Registrant Name:Alexei Pavlovitch
Registrant Street1:240 E Illinois
Registrant Street2:apt 1202
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Chicago
Registrant State/Province:Illinois
Registrant Postal Code:60611
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.3125936015
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:alex.pavlovitch@gmail.com
Admin ID:GODA-259235088
Admin Name:Alexei Pavlovitch
Admin Street1:240 E Illinois
Admin Street2:apt 1202
Admin Street3:
Admin City:Chicago
Admin State/Province:Illinois
Admin Postal Code:60611
Admin Country:US
Admin Phone:+1.3125936015
Admin Phone Ext.:
Admin FAX:
Admin FAX Ext.:
Admin Email:alex.pavlovitch@gmail.com
Tech ID:GODA-159235088
Tech Name:Alexei Pavlovitch
Tech Street1:240 E Illinois
Tech Street2:apt 1202
Tech Street3:
Tech City:Chicago
Tech State/Province:Illinois
Tech Postal Code:60611
Tech Country:US
Tech Phone:+1.3125936015
Tech Phone Ext.:
Tech FAX:
Tech FAX Ext.:
Tech Email:alex.pavlovitch@gmail.com
Name Server:NS07.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Name Server:NS08.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:

Change Marketing

david — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:13:54 +0000

Tom Megginson is a Canadian advertising guy who’s spending a lot of time with social media. He’s just launched a new blog, Change Marketing.

Nepotism aside …

I think I would have included a link to this blog even if he weren’t my brother’s, because of passages like this:

Branding accesses our very nature as social animals, taking advantage of the good feelings we get out of loyalty and admiration towards other human beings in our tribe. But in the case of companies and products, the personality traits are conjured up in an anthropomorphic emotional construct. We “like” favourite brands. We “trust” them. And most importantly, we make them part of our tribal identity.

and this:

Traditional marketers consider setting up a Facebook presence as something you DO. The problem is, the presence is all about who you ARE.

(From Social Media: Brand, don’t sell.)

Canadian house prices

david — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:32:30 +0000

I’m looking for February or March numbers, but according to Teranet and the National Bank of Canada, as of January 2009, house prices across Canada had dropped only 2.35% since January 2008 (that’s using CHPI, which is the more negative of the two major indices). Here’s a breakdown by major cities:

City (West to east)	CHPI change (Jan 08-Jan 09)
Vancouver	-4.16%
Calgary	-8.2%
Toronto	-2.44%
Ottawa	+2.11%
Montreal	+4.11%
Halifax	+1.24%

Why the disparity? Calgary is an oil city. When the recession hit and resource prices tanked, Calgary was the centre of a huge housing bubble because of high oil prices, and Vancouver was in a major real-estate bubble of its own because of the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics, so both had further to fall — they’re just adjusting back to realistic market prices.

Toronto is the financial centre of Canada, and we all know what happened to the finance industry, but it has a very wide employment base outside of finance, and vibrant immigrant community, and a lot of pent-up housing demand, so I’m not surprised to see a more moderate fall there.

Ottawa is the capital, so it has government jobs as a cushion, but it’s also one of Canada’s leading tech centres. While big companies like Nortel and Corel are in terminal decline, small tech companies around Ottawa are doing very well. I live here, and as far as I can tell, for-sale signs on lawns still don’t stay up too long.

Montreal. Montreal? It was the awkward poor sibling of big Canadian cities for a couple decades after the whole separatism thing started (and people and head offices fled to Ottawa and Toronto), but it’s been coming back recently — the streets aren’t as dirty, the heroin addicts are panhandling more politely, and after all, it’s still Montreal. Just like Manhattan in the 1970s at its dirtiest and most dysfunctional was still more fun than any other U.S. city, Montreal will always be the coolest Canadian city to visit. The suburban (and English-speaking) west end of the island is a huge centre for pharmaceutical companies, and perhaps they’re doing well in the recession (I haven’t checked).

Not much to say about Halifax, which is a much smaller city than the others, except that it’s a nice place, and I’m glad to see they’re doing well.

Perhaps when I find February or March figures, the news will be worse; then again, as a measurement tool, CHPI can make things look a lot worse than RSPI, so it’s just as likely that things are better than these number suggest.