Without a Yard

Some have noticed that the new gig has some, erm, restrictions on what I can say/publish about politics, which is totally fine & offers a handy excuse to neglect the blog.

BUT I couldn’t let this month-long provincial campaign go by without a non-partisan post begging y’all to give a crap…even if it’s a tiny crap.  You know what I mean.

Step One – Vote

Pretty much the LEAST you can do – consider it civic hygiene.  Best make sure that you are registered to do it on October 6th.  Don’t know which riding you’re in but can remember your postal code?  You’re golden.  Even if you’re super busy & can’t get to the polling station on E-day you can get a mail-in ballot.  Even if you’re away at school you can vote in your home riding or choose your school’s riding.  Even if you don’t live in the province anymore you can cast an absentee ballot.  Even if you are doing time you can vote from a correctional facility. You see where this is going, right?  No excuse.

Step Two – Read

The only thing hotter than a voter is an informed voter.  So get your read on, blaze up those GoogleAlerts, spice up your RSS reader & track campaign coverage from multiple outlets. Trevor’s built a fantastic resource on Politwitter that’ll serve up Ontario-only content.  He’s also aggregating blog posts that can be organized by province; same for Facebook pages.  Bonus points if you check party platforms before deciding which local candidate best represents your values & priorities.  Might also be fun to geek out & read past results for a context-refresher.

Step Three – Talk

Don’t get me wrong, FourSquare cafe check-ins, emo Instagram photos & food-related Twitter revelations are FASCINATING.  Just wondering if we could mix it up for the next month.  Try floating a leader’s campaign promise as a subject of discussion & see where things go.  Please note that Step Three is not labelled ‘Speech;’ talking means thoughtful conversations, interactions & respect for other points of view.  Godspeed on that one.

Step Four – Help

There are LOADS of gigs with Elections Ontario if you’d like to get involved hands-on. There’s also an Elections Ontario Outreach Team member for each riding who’ll support community events your organization is planning.  One of the most satisfying volunteer gigs I’ve ever worked was registering voters (you’d think it was rescuing all those drowning puppies, but no!).  Even if volunteers can’t actually get voters registered like in the U.S., you can point them to some great online information, including this post written specifically for new Canadians on Settlement.org or these youth-focused links & posts from Apathy Is Boring.

Thanks for indulging my nagging & good luck muddling through the onslaught of media coverage. Beats the breathless wannabe-L.A.  TIFF gossip, right?

In the midst of some eye-opening on-the-ground-coverage in Iran & reflections on social media’s use in times of crisis, Twitter‘s been lauded as a tool able to bring ‘outsiders’ into the loop with unprecedented immediacy and increasing importance.  Most well-known & demonstrative of its role thus far were yesterday’s announcement that the US State Department contacted Twitter HQ to request the delay of scheduled updates to ensure continued information was broadcast from innumerable frustrated citizens & the underwhelmed disappointment with mainstream media coverage of the election among observers worldwide over the past week (a.k.a. #CNNfail).

When asked by friends to explain Twitter (often phrased as “Why the crap are you on your iPhone again, Rudey McJerkalot?!”), which happens a lot since this (flattering?!) bizarro world recognition, it’s hard to describe the scale & scope of the medium.  Depending on who you choose to follow, your daily dose of information via Twitter can consist solely of leaked hiphop mixtape bittorrents, horoscopes, localvore recipes, or salacious spam.

Like blogging, Twitter’s had a tough go earning the respect of mainstream media.

Lest I sound like a mohawk’d-Misfits-lovin’-kid screaming ‘Punk’s not dead!’, with every ‘decline of the relevancy of X’ article, there’s another useful voice popping up or staying vibrant online – be it on Twitter, blogs or holographic robot interpretive dances. The bad/boring/bored robots rust – this ratio of success:fail says nothing about the medium – the same can be said for unrecorded songs, unpublished poems & unsewn outfits.

Hopefully after this week’s umpteenth demonstration of Twitter’s usefulness beyond hype-y marketing forays it’ll stop being second-guessed as a fuel source to move forward an issue’s narrative.

Closer to home, & far more capable of describing the whats & whos of Twitter, are the computer whizzes at Sysomos.  Their report released on Friday is phenomenal. Some brilliant observations can be gleaned from just scanning the Summary if you’re tight for time, here are my favourites with my comments in parentheses:

-  21% of users have never posted a Tweet (Would most agree that the 1/5 ratio of ‘lurkers’ is the same for chat rooms & forums?)

-  72.5% of users joined between January – May 2009 (Mind-boggling growth rates, thanks to Oprah & Ashton)

-  65.5% of self-identified ‘PR Professionals’ have never posted an update ( hm. )

-  55% of users use something other than Twitter.com’s webpage version, Tweetdeck is #1 with 19.7% marketshare (could determine viability of pay-to-play or tiered membership offering based on how many users opt for paid mobile applications)

Hopefully the next generation of this report could examine the content overall to determine how many posts are Retweets (or ‘RT’s), sharing website URLs & messages to ask/reply to other users (‘@’s back & forth) – this might give us a better idea of how conversational the medium can be vs. the broadcast-y nature in which it has been characterized/dismissed.

On that nerdy note, I bid you adieu & hope our paths cross in music nerdery this week during NXNE

Special hat-tip to Count Gavin (a.k.a. Gavin Stephens – hilarious Toronto comic) for movie-reference-reminder….