For some reason, I thought, “Hey why not see if good ol’ (or god-awful, depending on your point of view) Gordon Campbell is on Twitter.” Sure enough, he was. What about good ol’ (or god-awful, depending on your point of view) Carole James? She’s there too!

I added Gordon Campbell (@g_campbell) to my list… and within two hours he added me to his. Still waiting for Ms. James (@carolejames) to add me to hers. But considering that she’s not following anyone at the moment, I don’t think she’ll be inviting me to her list anytime soon. Granted, they’re both probably written by party staffers anyway.

Buzz Bishop (@buzzbishop) of 95.3 FM Virigin Radio fame tweets quite a bit, and I find his them to be a great source of what’s going on in Vancouver… and a great source for good eats! Local Vancouver Sun writer Gillian Shaw (@gilliamshaw) is a great read as well… She taught me a lot about how Twitter works on her recent Twitter article. For you Vancouver talk radio junkies, CKNW (@cknw) and News1130 (@news1130) are on it as well.

I’m sure that there are a more Vancouver twitter accounts out there. If you know of any good ones that we can follow, please leave a comment… Bonus points for you if you could find one that covers Vancouver’s food scene. I’m looking for more great places to eat!

Comic books and the internet seem to go hand and hand.  In fact apart from debating who was the best captain of the USS Enterprise it’s almost as if the net’s primary directive is to bring people together to argue about Grant Morrison.  Pretty much everyone who reads comics has a comics blog, even I had one for a short bit before I realized that even less people read it than my personal blog.

However despite my combined love of comics and interest in blogs I have never really pimped one of Vancouver’s better blogs and certainly one of the top local comic book blogs.  Truthfully it’s the only local one I’ve read but if I’m missing one let me know in the comments.  Sadly maybe it was my lack of link love that lead to this month’s shutting down of Between the Staples [bts].  Or maybe not.

Either way Between the Staples is one of a number of interest specific blogs around Vancouver that never quite get the attention that they deserve.  I’m as guilty of this as anyone, as a few select blogs tend to sort of talk in an echo chamber about themselves and kind of ignore that there’s thousands of other people writing around Vancouver. 

I have to go now, some idiot in this chat-room keeps insisting that Janeway was the best.

Part of being a public figure is that sooner or later people are going to say things about you that you don’t agree with.  It comes with the territory, and the longer you’re going to be in the spotlight the more that’s going to happen.  Hell these days just having a blog seems to be enough for people to give you their opinion on every facet of your life, and that’s fair because if you choose to share it then you’re inviting comments.

The quickly written unauthorized biography is a staple of the music world.  Collecting previously published interviews and then hammering those into some sort of narrative structure to capitalize on someone else’s success.  Want to find out the real story of Trent Reznor, that unauthorized biography of him that I bought certainly did not tell it.  Though to be honest official biographies, or autobiographies, are rarely any more interesting or accurate.

It’s understandable that having an un-official biography written about you would be annoying.  However it’s free speech and anyone is allowed to say almost anything verbally or in print, no matter how badly written or poorly researched.  Matthew Good was never going to be happy about Eric Blair’s Ghosts in the Machine [am], but having his fans remove all mention of its existence from Wikipedia was disappointing [mg].

As much fun as people poke at Wikilality, Wikipedia is a wonderful resource and one that is generally self-regulated to provide accurate information.  The fact is that this biography exists, and while it’s proper to point out that Matthew Good was not interviewed and doesn’t support the biography simply pretending it doesn’t exist runs contrary to the principals of Wikipedia.

From the Wikipedia History of the article on Matthew Good [wp]:

An unsactioned (sic) biography of Matthew Good was written in 2008 by Eric Blair entitled “Ghosts in the Machine”. However, Mr. Good has formally denounced the book, stating that “I wasn’t interviewed or contacted, no member of my family was interviewed or contacted, nor were any of my friends”. Further, Mr. Good states that “I don’t sanction it whatsoever as any representation of me, my work, or my personal history.”

That’s not exactly a glowing endorsement of the book, nor even a particularly good advertisement.  It seems fair and balanced, acknowledging the books existence while not calling the author gay, a thief or otherwise libeling him.

The truth is that the book exists.  For all anyone knows it actually might be brilliant, though more likely it’s rubbish.  Removing it from Wikipedia doesn’t change that.

The Vancouver Sun

One of two local dailies owned by the same company, yay Canwest, the Sun has always had a shitty website.  Their previous attempt seemed like it was designed before computers by someone who was either blind drunk or drunk and blind.

The Good:

• Clean layout.
• More access to stories that appeared in the print version.
• Blogs.
• Videos.
• Someone told them about Twitter.

The Bad:

• Complete douche bags comment regularly; the same ones who write letters to the editor.
• It’s still The Vancouver Sun.
• Giant keg of Heineken pops up every time a page loads.
• It kind of still feels like watching your grandfather try to Moonwalk.
• Someone told them about Twitter.

Conclusion:

A nice step forward for the media institution, however it’s still got a ways to go before they’ll really be a great source of online news.  Currently there’s still a usability versus monetization balance to be figured out, and they should spend a bit of/more time studying the Guardian [lg].

Scout Magazine

A new local online magazine?  Will it be a bastion of local reporting like The Tyee [ty], or is the business plan to sell domain name to the Cub Scouts in a few years.

The Good:

• Slick layout.
• Local focus.
• Lots of potential.
• Who doesn’t love all blogs unconditionally?
• Nice layout, fairly easy to navigate.
• Room to grow.
• Nice photographs.
• Good focus on local restaurants.

The Bad:

• Like NowPublic [np] news articles are just large chunks of quotes from actual media outlets.  That’s not reporting, it’s copy and pasting.
• The writing is uneven.
• Seems to be more interested in finding a lucrative target market than finding something worth saying.
• Interviews seemingly conducted via email meme: ie. everything seems to be a “What’s your favorite food.” type question, the kind of thing your friends forward you to post on your blog.
• A Facebook group, really what is it 2007?
• Does Beyond Robson [br] know that their layout was stolen and run through a Maxim-filter?

Conclusion:

Done right there’s probably a place to be staked out somewhere between the granola crunch of The Tyee and the major newspapers online.  Scout Magazine tries too hard to find that position.  A lot of the decisions seem to have more to do with tricking Google than providing content, quoting news stories does not mean you have a news section.

Though for one of the most obviously commerical aimed blogs/websites online, the ads are as prevalent as on the Sun’s site, it’s hard understand what they mean by ” Our readers are optimistic about our city and the world without being blind to its problems.”  Aiming for left of centre readers tends to work better if you’re not also describing them as the perfect target market in the next sentance, “They are ‘influencers’…”

Maybe that’s a little cynical, and every publication takes a while to find their feet.  The next couple of months will give Scout Magazine a chance to define itself, and to find a voice.

There’s been quite a bit of activity on the Vancouver blog scene the last week or so, and since I’ve been busy the way I’m going to cover it is to throw it all online in a big’ol roundup of news. It’s like a Morning Brew [br] of slightly outdated Vancouver blog news.

- Morning Brew: the best MB title ever [br].

- Best of 604: we tried to do a best of Vancouver blogs thing here during the summer, but everything just sort of got overwhelming and I couldn’t hack it. Rebecca’s a professional blogger unlike me, so she’ll avoid making a complete hash of it [b604].

- Canadian Blog Awards: Apparently there’s a Canadian Blog Awards. I’m not sure if they’re any more reputable than the awards that were around in thet late ’90s when I won first place for design for my hidiously garish Matthew Good Band fansite that I made with Angelfire, but hey they’ve got a beaver logo. Lots of local blogs got nominated including the previously mentioned Rebecca and Raul who is always worth a vote [h604].

- Northern Voice 2009: I went to Northern Voice in 2006 and pulled a muscle from constantly having to roll my eyes [mbv]. I sort of fell between the target audiances of people who were super new to blogs and the internet and the type of people who wanted to spend an hour arguing about comment moderation software. Having said that it sounds like in recent years the conference has been stellar and I’m most likely going to be giving it another go this year. The conference is in late Febuary, and right now has an open call for speakers.

The Georgia Straight: I’ve been freelancing for the tech section of The Georgia Straight for the last few months, and now they’ve launched a dedicated tech blog [tgs]. On a related note if this roundup of local blogging news has gotten you freshly interested in blogs, it’s worth checking out my article on local bloggers that ran a few issues ago [tgs].

Anytime anyone tries to do a definitive list of whose the best, most important, or drunkest, bloggers in Vancouver it always falls short.  It’s the nature of the beast, if you mention x number of people person x+1 will feel left out, and if you mention everyone then really you’re just doing a roll call.

It’s a trap that I tried to avoid when writing an article on the Vancouver blog scene in this week’s Georgia Straight [tgs].  I’m glad to have gotten a few people who don’t really get the coverage they deserve, at least not locally, involved in the article.  It’s worth a read, though since I wrote it I may be heavily biased.

Those who do read it might notice that I left out any mention of Metroblogging Vancouver.  I might have mentioned it briefly in relation to Beyond Robson [br], who’s Sean Orr I interviewed, but it took up quite a bit of words explaining what it was, what my role in it was and how it related to Beyond Robson and other Vancouver group blogs.

So if you were left out of the article and feel aggrieved, well so was I so suck it up.

Once again I’d like to thank everyone who agreed to be interviewed for the article.

“Hello Time Bomb” was at the top of MuchMusic’s charts when I tried to request it during a phone in request hour back in Kelowna.  I was working an extra long shift at the Uptown Cinema Centre, and wanted to hear the new Matthew Good Band track.  The DJ at The Lizard, which at that point was what passed for the alternative rock station, had never heard of the song.  He offered to play “Crash” by The Dave Matthews Band.

The Matthew Good Band was fast becoming one of my favorite bands, and since they toured British Columbia a lot more than U2 and charged a lot less for tickets I ended up going to a lot of shows.  At that point I’d already seen them at EdgeFest in Edmonton and since then I’ve seen the band and Matthew Good solo nearly twenty times.  My first time at the Commodore Ballroom was to see one of the band’s five shows that they played over the holidays between the release of Beautiful Midnight and The Audio of Being.  I’ve been to Kamloops and Penticton far more than I’d like simply to catch a show.

So Tuesday’s release of Matthew Good’s Live At Massey Hall album was an obvious buy for me.

Having such a compulsive need to see as many Matt Good live shows as I could, I had always been a strong believer in the need for him to release a live album.  One of the first things I had done when I had discovered the usefulness of Napster was to seek out bootlegged live songs.  The best of which were a handful of tracks that had been recorded in Germany, with only a little too much treble.

With all of my favorite artists I’ve always wanted a full Pearl Jam like live recording release.  These days all shows go through a mixing board of some kind, and attaching basic recording equipment to that would allow for a release of a live album for every concert performed. 

The Vancouver native didn’t go that far with his first live release, instead opting to focus on a single show at Toronto’s famed Massey Hall this past May [mg].  It’s traditional but Good’s promotion of the release almost exclusively through his website and iTunes could be the first step to a Radiohead / Nine Inch Nails like movement away from a traditional record label.  That the album is already at the top of the charts on the Canadian iTunes store and doing well in the States is  sign that maybe Good doesn’t need a label anymore.

I’ve spoken enough already about what I had hoped for, and what the future might hold.  The nitty gritty of a review should of course be about the record in question.  As it stands the album released on iTunes is just the first disc in a two disc set.  Recorded during Good’s return to full band touring after a few years of doing stripped down solo acoustic shows, the album focuses largely on his newer material with only “Hello Time Bomb” and “Load Me Up” surviving from the Matthew Good Band days.  (More MGB tracks will be on side two).

Having caught the Vancouver show on this tour, one of two of his shows I caught this year along with a cross boarder trip to Seattle for one of the acoustic dates, the tone is familiar.  Returning to a full band arrangement seems to have put a new burst of energy into some of the tracks, and while there’s a bit too much musical noodling at times we’re not talking about a Grateful Dead style jam session. 

Acoustic tracks will be part of the second disc, and were a large component of the In A Comabest of album from a few years ago, but I’d have almost preferred a release from one of his acoustic shows.  Still that’s complaining about what the album’s not, as opposed to focusing on what it is.  Good and backing band are tight and this is probably the closest we’ll ever get to the definitive live collection from his career.  It stands up well against other arstis’ live releases, and if it lacks the courage of Pearl Jam’s “release everything ever” philosophy then it’s worth noting that so does every other act in the world who aren’t Pearl Jam.

At the end of the day this disc isn’t going to convince anyone whose not already a Matthew Good fan to become one.  I think anyone cautious of really giving him a chance because of the radio hits like “Hello Time Bomb” should still check out his solo work like Hospital Music, but like a best of album this is mostly a repackaging of what’s come before.

It’s still a worthy purchase for any fan.  Anyone whose deep into his catalogue will have a few tracks they would have liked to have seen.  My all time favorite song of his is “Suburbia” and it’s nowhere to be seen, it’s also a fucking fantastic song live.  Thankfully it does have “Black Helicopter” his best track since.

I’m still going to see him live as long as he’s within driving distance, but to hold me over through the lean months when Matthew Good isn’t on the road I know have something to hold me over.  Matthew Good Live at Massey Hall is the methadone for my live concert habit.

All photos by Jeffery Simpson.

to celebrate their ten year birthday Google has put their oldest available search index online. Now for a limited time you can search their database that was active in 2001 [g01] as well as my hilariously ugly Matthew Good Band fansite and various student paper stuff [g01]. What will you find if you do? Well for starters you’ll find one of my first blogs [g01] as well as the fact that that other Jeffrey Simpson (a senior writer at The Globe and Mail) had a slightly larger web presence than I did, even though I kind of figure that he had no idea what the internet was at that point.

Give the search a try, and see what comes up. In 2001 for example there was no iPod. What a backwards age that must have been.

Vancouver comes up with not one of the very popular blogs that dot our digital landscape now, at least not on the first page. Who does show up? Well the Vancouver Grizzlies [g01]. The closest thing to the social networking sort of sites that we all laud now [mbv] is a now defunct page for the local chapter of IndyMedia.

These days you can’t throw a rock into the air without hitting someone trying to sell their SEO (search engine optimization) skills or a blogger fretting about Page Rank. 2001 seems so quaint and unspoiled, like an episode of Road to Avonlea.

Maybe I shouldn’t be sarcastic with the title, maybe they do know the internet. I mean they at least know the fundamental fact that the best way to get traffic is to mention people by name. It’s the same thing we used to do in the student press, a front page picture of a rock band would only get picked up by fans of that band but a front page picture of a bunch of students would get picked up by the students, their friends and anyone who wanted to sleep with any of the students pictured.

It was circulation gold.

So when NowPublic, the people who don’t seem to understand Creative Commons licenses so spam you four times a week on Flickr asking to use your photos, the Vancouver Sun must have thought “Hey NowPublic is already repurposing all of our content as large block quotes and calling it ‘Citizen Journalism’ we might as well get involved in a link baiting scheme with them.”

And thus was born the link baiting list of Vancouver Top 20 most influential bloggers. A list that’s been run in other cities, and finally makes it up to Vancouver. Now the one thing that they’ve improved over previous cities is that NowPublic at least now gives outgoing links to the winners’ blogs whereas before the links just redirected to other pages on NowPublic and the bloggers were asked to sign in and edit their own NowPublic profile and thus by simply having a NowPublic account were counted as NowPublic contributors. In the Vancouver list they actually figured out the internet enough to realize that if you’re writing about someone you should probably link to them.

Which you might note is not what I’m doing, but that’s only because it’s tacky to link to link bait.

Now of course this is the internet, and egos are involved so the list instantly set off, well how would I say it, complaining about rank [mg], noting that the list misspelled their name [bh] which I think if you’re going to make a big fuss about honouring people you’d better at the very least spell their name right and of course celebrating [rr].

That’s not to say that the people on this list don’t deserve recognition. Unlike LA’s list there’s no total tools on the Vancouver blog scene, and everyone on this list that I’ve ever met and dealt with has always proven to be very kind and giving of their time. Two of them Rebecca Bollwitt [m604] and Travis Smith [hs] were founding bloggers here at Metroblogging Vancouver and both Darren Barefoot [db] and Alfred Hermida [rr] have been kind enough to speak with me for interviews in my freelance work.

The problem with the list is that it’s just a call for incoming links. As Sean Bonner, Metroblogging co-founder and member of LA’s list pointed out [mbla]:

There’s no question that a good number of people on that list have notable online presence but that’s very different than being influential. Having a few thousand people follow you on twitter because occasionally you say something amusing, or having a bunch of people listing you as a contact on flickr because you post interesting photos does not make you influential. These folks all do things online a lot, but does that mean they know what they are talking about? I’m on that list and that’s a total sham. Anyone who reads what I have to say knows I’m full of shit most of the time, so I’m certainly not influential. I’m not knocking anyone else on the list, they all have their own audience for sure, but if you look there’s not a lot of overlap in which audiences those are which might suggest NowPublic was trying to cast a wide net as it’s pretty safe to assume most of these folks might mention this “award” and link back to NowPublic, which again is obviously the point in the first place.

Now of course it’s easier for Bonner to point out the flaws with the list than it is me because the easy criticism is that I’m simply jealous that I didn’t make the list. Right, because I wanted NowPublic to give my name and contact information to their marketing company like they did in previous cities [sb] for future spamming. Though one has to ask where Sean Orr is on the list, since love him or hate him people read Sean Orr and the Morning Brew [br].

Me? Heck five people read my website and as much ballot stuffing as my mother would have done apparently influencing her is not a big deal. Metroblogging Vancouver isn’t me, isn’t mine and isn’t something that I should get credit for because it’s a team effort. No one person runs this site, or writes its content so to have been put on any sort of list for my work here would have been missing the point entirely. That NowPublic boils Rebecca’s blogging accomplishments down to sometimes being a blogger here, with no mention of her own blog apart from the outgoing link, is a clear sign that a lot of thought went into the list.

But of course that’s the way these lists are. I’ve made enough of them with and without editorial groups helping to know that it’s all just a bunch of hooey. It’s a bunch of people sitting in a room throwing names out, all for their own reasons. At least The Georgia Straight’s Best of List was voted on by readers [gs] and thus the public. (Disclaimer: I freelance for The Georgia Straight).

Again this is not to insult anyone on this list. As far as I’ve ever experienced they’re all incredibly nice people, and influence far more than just their mothers.

Apologies for not posting for a little while.  First The Georgia Straight said they’d pay me to write for them, and I was sort of shocked by the fact that there’s money to be made in this writing thing, so I started doing that [tgs][tgs].  It didn’t help us win best local blog [tgs] but being paid in actual money is even better.

I’d like to thank Tim, Ryan and Castewar for keeping things going during my downtime.  It’s really great to have authors contributing to the site, and though I’ll be doing the typical recruitment campaign shortly it’s nice to know that the blog is in a position where if I get busy it’s not laying fallow.