Some of you might already be familiar with The Dirty Rectangles, the team of indie game designers that convene once a month at Avant Garde bar to show off new games and talk shop.

Next Wednesday is their last Show and Tell event of the year, and The Dirty Rectangles are letting me present a talk I did this summer at the Northern Voice conference.

The talk focuses on the idea of “gamifying the news”, but it’s basically an excuse to talk about why gamification marketing methods never work and how proper video game design can encourage people to do un-fun things, like read the news more (that might ruffle a few feathers, but the presentation rests on a pretty specific definition of “fun”).

The event is free and is always packed with interesting people. Feel free to show up check out some games, and disagree with me completely. I love a good debate.

The event is December 21st, 8 PM at the Avant Garde bar. More details can be found at The Dirty Rectangles site.

Banner image courtesy Jaymi Heimbuch and Alfred Hermida.

OpenFile invited me to blog for them as part of their new Saturday coverage and I got to write about some stories MediaStyle readers would love.

Here’s a brief rundown of what I got up to:

The MorningFile and Saturday Reads were all the news you needed today.

Reporter Glen McGregor crowdsourced the research for a profile inspired by @WeAreTheDead.

Everything you need to read about pedestrian safety this week.

Who designed the new John McRae memorial garden?

A list of clubs for Ottawa robot enthusiasts.

Banner image courtesy TheGiantVermin.

Last week I posted a teaser for a documentary I’m shooting about modern homes in Ottawa.

I was also hard at work producing an OpenFile story about a promising new modern development in Hintonburg. You can find that story right here.

For a quick summary of what the building will look like, I produced this video to accompany the story. It features architect Anthony Bruni of Colizza Bruni Architecture describing some interesting features of his latest design.

Banner image courtesy Anthony Bruni.

I think I can speak for all of us at MediaStyle when I say we’re Apple nerds.

While some people might be sad about Steve Jobs’ recent resignation from chief executive at Apple his, I think communicators can learn some important ideas from Steve Jobs. Like thinking of user experience, audience and customers first when creating. Or knowing when to start from scratch if a project isn’t working. Or even knowing when to start from scratch when a project is successful to avoid stagnating.

To read more about some of these lessons, I’ve compiled some of the more enlightening coverage of the Steve Jobs announcement that I’ve read this week.

Why Apple doesn’t need Steve Jobs [Business Insider]

What makes Steve Jobs so great? [Co.Design]

Steve Jobs attention to detail in 313 patents [New York Times]

Apple has thrived under Tim Cook, but who is he? [Globe and Mail]

Banner image courtesy Håkan Dahlström

Next week the process ramps up with (Re)Generation: Voices for Canada, a nationwide event from March 6-12 where Canadians from across the country will participate in face-to-face gatherings to discuss their hopes and ideas for their country and their future. Over 50 Canadians have already registered to host events from coast to coast.

Results from the online questions and small-group discussions will lead to a round of priority voting during which Canadians from across the country will complete the Declaration for Change by voting to find their top priorities for government action. Once the Declaration is complete, Leadnow.ca will ask Canadians to back it by committing to vote for the politicians who will rise to the challenge in the next election.

Will they be able change the language of Canadian politics?

MediaStyle was proud to help host the pre-launch event here in Ottawa on February 10 and will be supporting the Leadnow.ca efforts online, but they are not an official client.

I recently wrote a story for OpenFile about the use of open data in Ottawa and the upcoming International Open Data Hackathon. It combines a few of the things that readers of the MediaStyle blog love: design, technology, and helping people in cool ways. I’ve included an excerpt below, and the full story can be found here.

Ottawa’s rapidly developing open data community has only been around for a few months, but it’s already had a stunning impact at City Hall.

Since April 2010, a group of developers and tech enthusiasts has worked on building the community almost from scratch.

Open data is the philosophy of unlicensed and unrestricted access to public data. In Ottawa’s case, that means municipal data like park locations, recreational schedules, bus routes, and election information that has been slowly made available for public use over the last year.

Ottawa’s open data community is known for its collaborative tendencies. Programmers and developers here will come together at City Hall on Dec. 4, where they’ll join participants in 51 other cities around the world in the International Open Data Hackathon.

The hackathon unites programmers under one roof to work collaboratively for the day. Much like a similar Open Data Hackfest at City Hall last April, the event is meant to spur the development of smartphone and web applications that use data to help citizens.

Edward Ocampo-Gooding, a developer for local start-up Shopify, is often credited with founding the open data community in Ottawa.

Ocampo-Gooding first brought the idea of open data to the city’s information technology sub-committee in April.

Inspired by an Ignite talk by Nick Charney in April of 2009, Ocampo-Gooding teamed with Mary Beth Baker and developer Daniel Beauchamp to help promote open data projects in Ottawa. That process included finding engaged citizens on Twitter and personally inviting them to open data events.

Full story here. OpenFile encourages the evolution of news stories, so be sure to comment and add to the discussion.

I can’t think of another time in history (in my whole 24 years of being aware of it) when so much transition was happening in human communication. Or when so much of the work was being done by one entity.

In this case, it’s Google.

Andrew Madden is a former tech journalist and currently the strategic partner and development manager at Google News. He spoke in Ottawa on Nov. 9th, and if you’ve been following Google News’ campaign to quell the worries of the print industry, you’re already familiar with what he had to say, which is:

–The Internet has reached a wider audience faster than any other technology.
–The sudden growth of the Internet is terrifying, but creates enormous opportunity.
–Instead of scheduling themselves around media, people now expect to get media when they want it (and on multiple devices).
–Google News is a platform to support content: Google’s job is to get people as quickly as possible to content they need and to keep them off Google.

Madden was careful to explain the lengths that his team goes through to include newspapers in search results. This includes soliciting site maps to better find content, negotiating deals with stubborn (my word, not Madden’s) newspapers that use pay walls and meeting with newspapers to discuss their online plans. Not to mention endless experiments in content delivery and customization.

Which is why I can’t understand the fears associated with Google News. They seem to be putting in a lot of the grunt work figuring out how journalism will work online. And they aren’t a content producing, so they shouldn’t be a threat to newspapers. The audience, a group of journalists, editors, and publishers, provided a passive aggressive question period. There were two that caused me particular concern.

Liz Thompson (@LizT1) asked how journalists are to compete with “Lady Gaga” headlines.

Andrew Mayeda (@amayeda) commented that creating video and other online content was “fun”, but that we need to keep “serious” journalism alive.

Others wondered how to optimize their SEO without sacrificing integrity. Why wonder at all? Liz Thompson competes with Lady Gaga headlines on Google News just as much as she does when her story is printed anywhere. Andrew Mayeda’s serious journalism will continue to be produced no matter how many YouTube videos and blogs posts exist (Why bother making the distinction, anyway?).

It’s the Tyranny of the Masses. The Internet has shown what everyone is reading. It isn’t always (scratch that: usually isn’t) serious journalism, but knowing that shouldn’t scare journalists. The eyeballs that have always read print news continue to do so online. The Internet is an opportunity to keep those eyeballs and gain more, not to lament the eyeballs stuck on Lady Gaga news.

Madden ended the night explaining, “We experiment endlessly. Even if we fail, we learn.”

Power Panel: CBC’s Power & Politics (Mon. Nov 1) from Ian Capstick on Vimeo.

Craig Silverman is the journalist behind Regret the Error, the co-author of Mafiaboy: How I Cracked The Internet and Why It’s Still Broken, and the managing editor of PBS.org MediaShift. [Full disclosure: MediaStyle principal Ian Capstick is a contributor to the MediaShift blog] He’s also part of the team, headed by Wilf Dinnick, that is creating the transparent, multimedia, open-sourced news website OpenFile. In the first of this two-part interview, Silverman discusses the genesis of OpenFile, what separates audience from news, and the business model of news online. -Travis Boisvenue

What’s the elevator pitch for OpenFile?

The short version is that it’s a collaborative local news site.

Collaborative meaning that anybody from the community in Toronto–maybe they’re seeing something happening on their street and they’re wondering, “why are all these trees being cut down?”–they can go to the site, open what we call a File, and say, “there are trees being cut down all over the street, I’m wondering ‘why?’”

And if we at OpenFile, the editors, look at that and say “this is a good story”, we assign it to a reporter.

So the idea is that rather than just having a bunch of editors decide “here is what the news is today”, we’re going to be working with the community, with the people. Their ideas, their suggestions, and then the actual process of reporting is also collaborative. We’re going to be inviting people to be part of the process of putting a story together, we’re going to ask them to add information, add insights.

We’re very very focused on local stories. The term “hyper local” is obviously very popular. Stuff that a larger city paper might not care about is something we definitely care about, and because everything on the site is geo-tagged, as we build up more and more information and Files on the site, you’ll be able to go in and enter your postal code and find a whole page full of things that might be as relevant to you.

It’s aggressively local, it’s open, it’s collaborative, and, of course, it’s online only. So we’re going to be doing a lot of stuff with multimedia.

The ideas behind OpenFile seem to come from gripes with how print media is being run.

I think there’s that element. Overall, we see it as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. A lot of the things that we’re trying to do have been suggested over the years, and in a lot of cases tested.

I would say one of the core problems that we’re trying to address is the separation between people in a community and a news organization that’s supposed to represent and cover that community. It’s true that you could call up the local newspaper and say, “I have a story” and get someone on the phone, or send in an email. But the chances of there being any follow-up, let alone you being part of that process beyond that initial phone call, let alone any credit or acknowledgement for you in any official way, that’s pretty unlikely.

And from my background I’ve spent a lot of time looking for accuracy and errors and corrections, that’s an area of expertise for me. And there is kind of a truth about errors and corrections that I think relates to journalism in general, and it is that we rely on people to spot our mistakes as journalists, and in a lot of ways we also rely on the public to tell us what’s going on, but the problem with corrections is that a lot of the time people won’t bother to report an error that they spot because they think that people in the newsroom won’t care. They don’t know how to go about doing that, and in a lot of cases they don’t think that journalists are all that interested in being accurate.

If you think about a general news example, a lot of people don’t know how to go about getting someone at a newspaper to report something, especially if they’re a regular member of the community, not someone with a PR person. There is a real barrier when there is not a clear message being sent by media organizations saying, “listen, we want you to be a part of this, we want to know about what issues matter to you and what your ideas are”. There is no formal process for it, and that’s sort of a core thing in [OpenFile's] mandate. We’ve got a clear process and a clear message saying, “we want to hear from you”, and we’re not just going to take your story idea and hope that you hear about it later.

Another challenge is figuring out a viable online business model for journalism.

What’s that business model looking like so far?

Our plan is to do advertising rather than to do a pay wall. If you look at the beta site right now, there is no advertising. Obviously, that’s going to change. But one thing you’re probably not going to see, or ever going to see on the site, are your typical google ads, banners, text ads–that kind of thing. In terms of a sustainable model, if you are only selling those kinds of ads, banners, clicks, and things like that, you’re going to have a hard time supporting real journalism. So there are two things we are going for. Number one, we’re going to be looking at a sponsor model, something along the lines of what you might see at PBS where specific programs are paid for by specific foundations. So we are talking to larger organizations about becoming founding sponsors and offering them exclusive placement and positioning on the site.

The second part is the long term part. We’re geotagging everything that goes on the site. As the site evolves and there is more and more content, and as we see where people are distributed over the city, all of a sudden we can do location-based advertising. We think that advertising is more and more looking towards contextual, looking towards location-based.

You mentioned “real journalism”. What kind of distinction do you make between print journalists and bloggers that haven’t had print experience?

For right now we probably are working with people who have done published work for pay. And frankly I don’t distinguish if they’ve written for an online publication or if they’ve written for the Toronto Star. If someone has written real, quality reportive pieces and has been paid for them, that to me is journalism. If someone is writing their own blog and that’s something they do as a hobby–and we see that there is quality work there–and we think that there is a story that they might be really good at, I think think that we’re willing to take a chance on them.

Our vision over time is that people who start on the site as users and typical citizens–if over time they build a reputation and show that they are really good at sniffing out facts and sniffing out stories–if they seem to be good in terms of writing, we do see a time in the future where we can promote people to be reporters for the site, even if they aren’t a full-time reporter.

Do you see OpenFile as a model that could replace traditional newspapers?

As a general statement, I think that if your idea is you launch something new and its going to erase things that have been there for hundreds of years, you’re probably not going to have a lot of success. I see it as an “and” situation rather than as an “or” situation. There are things that the Toronto Star does, for example, they we’re probably never going to be able to do. They maintain a full-time bureau covering city hall. We don’t see ourselves doing that. We certainly see ourselves doing a lot of reporting about city hall and decisions made there and how they affect local communities. I think those institutions for the most part will continue.

For me, it’s just a broadening of options available to people, and really offering a different kind of relationship, experience, and ultimately a different kind of information product. So yeah, I see there to be an element of coexisting. If you look on the site, we already are linking to all kinds of different reports at National Post, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, Toronto Sun. We’re linking to the great work they do when their work touches on areas that we’re looking at. And obviously i think that that’s a bit of a distinction: they’re starting to link out a bit more, but they’re pretty hesitant to show somebody what’s going on at a competing place, whereas we very much embrace the idea of doing that.