I’m going to break rule number 1 about writing a new blog post… man, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted something here! What a graveyard this blog has been! Great to be back!

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s what I’ve been up to over the past couple of months…

I’ve taken a full time job with Global Television in Burnaby. It’s really a continuation of the work I’ve been doing there over the past year. I’m doing a lot of the graphics automation work for the Digital Newsroom project. Essentially Global Television went from having full control rooms in every station across Canada to having 4 production supercentres in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Toronto. So at our station in Vancouver, we handle the technical requirements of getting the shows to air in Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Kelowna, Victoria, as well as the shows in Vancouver. The local reporters and anchors are still in the local markets, we just have the cameras, stories, and everything fed back to Vancouver, and all the control room functions happen in one of our three control rooms in Vancouver. In order for this to work, the graphics systems have to tie into the scripting systems so all the names you see on the screen can be entered in Montreal or wherever, and show up on a computer in Vancouver to be inserted into the show. Since Victoria, Kelowna, and Global National all have different graphics looks than the local Global look, we have to be able to take the graphics data and have it seamlessly show up in the look of the show you happen to be doing without retyping all the names.

Suffice it to say that this is a technical challenge that hasn’t really been attempted previously, and was too juicy for me to pass up. It’s not everyday that you get the chance to be a part of something that complex and interesting at the broadcast level. I’ve learned a ton about not only news workflow, but writing code and really getting deep into the workings of the Avid Deko character generator, and how to make it do what we needed it to do.

That being said, upNext Media continues in a different form. I closed the office at the end of January, as it wasn’t being used, and moved back to being a home-based business. While continuing to support the ongoing projects that we are a part of, I will have an announcement soon about a new endevour we are taking on.

In the meantime, great to be back!

Tonight will be a first for upNext Media, as we are going to have a booth at the fabulous Taste of the Tricities. This event is put on by the Society for Community Development and the Tricities Chamber of Commerce.

When: Tonight, September 16th. 5:30pm – 9pm
Where: The Red Robinson Show Theatre at the Boulevard Casino in Coquitlam.

We’ll have a booth there to talk to people about using video and new media to market their business or organization. Enter our business card draw, and you could win a brand-new iPod Nano.

We’ll see you there!

On Wednesday, August 20th there was a tragic shooting in Surrey. It appears that an Indo-Canadian man opened fire during a domestic dispute, killing his wife and critically injuring his daughter.

As part of the news coverage, Global TV talked with Manpreet Grewal of Abbotsford Community Services, and ran clips from the Village of Men public service announcements that we produced. Once again we are reminded of how important this issue is. If you are aware of any family that has domestic violence issues, there is help available. Visit www.villageofmen.com and get help today.

Here is a link to the story that ran on Global BC.

Wordcamp was all about learning and interacting with other users of the WordPress blogging platform, which happens to be the software behind upnext.ca, strocel.com, and jackchristie.com. So it was a great opportunity to get tips on using the system, as well as network with other bloggers.

So I get in line for registration, and who’s right in front of me but my brother James coming out from Abbotsford. So it was nice to catch up with him, and makes me think we should talk more often so if we’re showing up at the same event we could meet for dinner or something.

Anyways, looked like about 80-100 people in the room for an evening speakers, chatting, and those great Coast Hotel clickable pens. The presenters were…

• Raul from hummingbird604.com about why we should switch to WordPress and suggested some good plugins
• Gary from bluefur.com on business blogging and the importance of engagement
• Kulpreet from kulpreetsingh.com on WordPress security and why nobody should have a WordPress author named “admin”
• Rebecca from miss604.com about creating custom sidebars and pages. She had a great point about having post titles match the content for better SEO.
• John from johnchow.com on getting more traffic to your blog. I now know what to do with the all in one SEO plugin.

Thanks to everyone who organized the event and came to speak, it was well run and I’m looking forward to the next one.

You’ve all been wondering, “Gee…Jon hasn’t posted to his blog in over a month. I really miss his witty insight, as it makes my life complete. What’s going on?”

Well wonder no longer! We’ve been hard at work on the all-new upNext.ca, and I’m happy to announce that we’re launching today. Even though we have things to add, and the content might be a little rough around the edges at first, we’re flipping the switch anyways. We’re all adventurous like that.

Some highlights of the new site…

• A great new newsletter that you can sign up for on the front page. We’ll be talking about marketing your organization and all sorts of other life-affirming stories. I would call it “Chicken Soup for the Soul” with a marketing bent, but if I called it that I would get sued by those Chicken Soup guys. So… I won’t. Sign up today and get ready for our first issue in August.
• Information about what we do is more organized from the standpoint of you, our loyal reader. Who cares about what we are all about, what’s more important is how we’re going to help you market and grow your organization.
• Testimonials, we got some really great testimonials from some of our favourite clients, thank you so much to all of you who took the time to do that for us. We’re blushing, honestly.

Have a look around, tell me what you think, and definitely tell me if something doesn’t work. It’s much appreciated.

Thanks to the wonder of video on the web, we have access to some great conference talks that would cost thousands of dollars to go see in person (if we could get in at all). The TED Conferences bring together some of the world’s greatest ideasmiths to present, and they are nice enough to post much of this material online where we can all enjoy it.

Here’s Seth’s talk from 2003 about the kinds of marketing ideas that get our attention, and why as he puts it, being safe is risky.

On January 19th, 1953, Lucille Ball went to the hospital on “I Love Lucy”. 44 million people tuned in to watch, 71.1% of all television households in America watched that show, with 20 million TV households. When Elvis appeared on Ed Sullivan in 1956, 60 million people (82.6% of houses with a TV) sat down to watch. Truly mass media arrived in time to fill that leftover leisure time.

But today, something is changing.

Clay Shirky, a adjunct professor at NYU, stood up at the Web 2.0 conference last week and gave a speech entitled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.

He talks about the “cognitive surplus” that happens when societies change. In the 20th century that surplus was taken up by television. People are now moving away from TV and towards becoming an active part of communities online. When only a small amount of time is taken away from our collective TV watching, we can together create things like Wikipedia.

Read the article, an excellent and fascinating take on the changes going on around us.

It works in a couple of ways

1. It’s immediate – Ian can record and post a video very quickly, allowing him to make timely comments about the market or current news.

2. It’s personal – No script, no makeup, very informal. You come away with the sense this is really the guy you’re dealing with.

3. It’s effective – By using Vimeo, the quality of video and audio is pretty amazing considering the environment is his car.

I worry about the implications of people broadcasting video from their moving car, but Ian is on the right track here.

Check out his videos here.

View on Youtube here

Setting off in the 88 degree heat of the early evening, I headed over to have a look, meeting up with one of my co-workers along the way.

The site is basically an intersection on the north side of an elevated rail line. The site is a park called Dealey Plaza, with some plaques around that explain where the motorcade route was. We headed over to where the shooting took place. You stand on the side of the road, on the left is the book depository, on the right is the grassy knoll. In the middle of the street are 2 ‘X’s where the bullets hit. On the sidewalk are a few conspiracy theorists selling newspapers, but overall it’s just a small, quiet park on a well used thoroughfare. The most interesting part wasn’t the site itself, but the people who were there.

There are some steps on the side of the grassy knoll where people can sit. There must have been 15 or 20 people there having a look around. The younger people were looking around and chatting as they theorized about whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald could have squeezed off those shots in that small of a space that quickly. But there was a marked difference with the older people who came.

Many of them were just sitting and silently lost in thought as they gazed upon the place where JFK was gunned down. For them, it was a real memory, one of those things where you knew where you were and exactly what you were doing when you heard the news. The spot has a real effect on people, taking them right back to that day almost 45 years ago.

Their memories aren’t necessarily about what happened at that spot, but about their own personal experience of that event. Many would have been school children, being gathered in a hasty school assembly and sent home for the day. Many were at home watching a teary Walter Cronkite. The image of John Jr. saluting the funeral procession. At that spot, the communal experience of the assassination blended with the personal memories.

Often times we make too much of celebrities in our culture. But today, these are often the people who also become part of our daily experience through the power of mass media. Most of the time it’s trivial, but in some places, like sitting on the grassy knoll on Friday, it truly is a part of our lives.