Updates from Ideas

• TrafFIX

  Got two seconds? Think about the car in front of you

  

  Posted by Jocelyne Dignard-Saleh at 6:38 pm on February 20, 2010
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  Some of my family members were rear-ended this week.

  They were stopped in traffic when a vehicle coming up behind did not brake early enough. It hit their car and pushed it into the vehicle in front of them. Luckily they were not seriously injured.

  After enduring three months of heachaches, a stiff neck and back and four months of physiotherapy after being rear-ended myself, I’m now nervous when vehicles creep up behind me or I ride with a driver who follows the next car too closely.

  Lack of distance between cars has become a personal pet peeve.

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• NewsBIZ

  Revival of the webmaster key to newspapers’ future

  

  Posted by Tim Burden at 2:29 pm on February 20, 2010
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  This is part two of a two-part post which started here. To recap, we said news companies should get better at predicting web trends. One way to do that is to watch what Google is aiming at and try to figure out its plan. One of those things is IPv6. Google wants to build apps that push information to your devices. Let’s look at some more Google trends, and at the end we’ll make some suggestions about what news companies should plan for.

  HTML5

  I talked earlier about how Google is pushing for HTML5, and web standards in general. I suggested a reason: Google wants you to be able to use its web-based applications from whatever device you happen to be on. It wants to replace your desktop (or your mobile interface, etc.) with a browser. You’ll do everything, in Google’s vision, on the open web, rather than in walled-off applications on various devices that may or may not talk to each other.

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• CouncilFIX

  Advice for Toronto mayoral candidates: keep it moving

  

  Posted by Jocelyne Dignard-Saleh at 9:33 pm on February 15, 2010
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  In a city the size of Toronto, the most important issue for the mayoral candidates must be transportation.

  Not many people living here are happy with the transportation situation. The drivers are frustrated over downtown gridlock, TTC patrons over bad service, cyclists over what they perceive to be not enough routes. Everyone is weighing in on the answers, or the lack of. Bloggers are hopping on the subject.

  Several solutions have been bandied about, including one recently encouraged with the participation of city council: car sharing.

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• CouncilFIX

  Oh, shut up already about Adam Giambrone

  

  Posted by Stephen Humphrey at 5:56 pm on February 13, 2010
  14 Comments 1 image
  

  OMG! Did you hear? Adam Giambrone cheated on his girlfriend and the other woman called the press because she totally thought he was married, which he wasn’t but then she read it in the paper and, like, totally went public.

  OMG! That’s, like, so Tiger Woods!

  You bet. Toronto city councillors are finally giving the city a show. I mean, the garbage strike was all kinds of thrills and spills, but it was messy and called for audience participation.

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• EcoFIX

  Writing to politicians can help them see green

  

  Posted by Samantha Butler at 4:34 pm on February 13, 2010
  No Comments 1 image
  

  Turns out it’s worth sitting down and writing a letter to your MP after all.

  Private conservation consultant and former Conservation Officer for Ontario, Paul Love, spoke at a seminar organized by the Univeristy of Toronto’s Centre for the Environment Wednesday afternoon. The series aims to educate the public on environmental issues.

  After getting everyone up to speed on the latest moves towards energy conservation and emissions reductions in Ontario, Love had an uplifting message for people wanting to do more.

  “Letters to politicians do not get ignored. Letters to the editor in papers, blogs – use your media. Ministers are very aware of it… They get a personal letter, and it will get attention.”“Letters to politicians do not get ignored. Letters to the editor in papers, blogs – use your media. Ministers are very aware of it… They get a personal letter, and it will get attention.”

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• NewsBIZ

  News organizations: less reaction, more prediction

  

  Posted by Tim Burden at 4:01 pm on February 10, 2010
  No Comments 1 image
  

  Some of you coming to a blog called NewsBIZ might expect talk about the news business, and you’d be right.

  So why have I spent my first two posts talking about gibberish like web standards, HTML5, Google, Apple and all that jazz?

  I hinted at it near the end of my last post, where I said news companies should not bother to invest in Flash for the time being: news organizations need to get better at predicting trends and investing accordingly. Notoriously, newspapers pretty much missed the Internet revolution, allowing once-profitable classifieds businesses to disappear almost overnight and generally just not getting the whole thing.

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• NewsBIZ

  11 reasons to like HTML5

  

  Posted by Tim Burden at 3:23 pm on February 7, 2010
  2 Comments Video
  

  The other day I tweeted out 11 reasons to like HTML5, the next step in the evolution of the language that powers the web. But that was a little off the cuff, and though it wasn’t bad, here’s a revised and expanded version.

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• NewsBIZ

  Apple and Google go to war, Adobe takes collateral damage

  

  Posted by Tim Burden at 11:50 pm on February 3, 2010
  10 Comments

  Back in 2003, when we webmasters got together in online forums to discuss our trade, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was our constant lament. Internet Explorer didn’t render our websites correctly. IE didn’t do JavaScript right. IE didn’t follow web standards. IE bad. IE sucks.

  Microsoft’s market-dominating web browser made a developer’s life harder when, after coding a website according to accepted standards, he had to turn around and throw in seemingly endless hacks and tricks to make the thing work for what was then the other 95 per cent of web users.

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