Cbc Tech Column Videos

Satellite tracking isn t new we ve had G-P-S around for years. But you may be surprised at what they re starting to do with the technology now. For one, you may be being tracked without your knowledge . and no satellites are involved at all! Cell Phones: The New GPS

Maybe you ve had this experience. You feel achey one day, a little bit sick. And so you make a quick appointment with Dr. Google. If you find yourself turning to the Internet to try to diagnose your ailments, you re not alone. The CBC s technology columnist Tod Maffin has more on this growing trend of cyberchondriacs. This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker. ShareThis

Here s sometime a little hard to imagine. Pretend that every half hour, you have to enter a little something about yourself and post it publicly on the Internet. What you re eating at that moment, what project you re working on, and so on. Sound crazy? Well thousands of Canadians are doing it, and it s all because of a new phenomenon known as micro-blogging. The CBC s technology columnist Tod Maffin sheds some little light on this peculiar behaviour. This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker. ShareThis

This week s CBC tech column was about My Spy a great little Windows application that always checks your bank account balance and, if it spots a withdrawl (from an ATM or a pre-authorized debit) go through, it alerts you right away. A video of the full-length interview I did with Darren Stevens will be coming shortly. This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker. ShareThis

You don t need to spend too much time reading the papers to know that it s getting harder for organizations to hire good people. Baby boomers are retiring, and there just aren t enough Canadians willing to fill the jobs. It s especially tough for the public sector. Nurses, politicians, civil servants, er public radio hosts not exactly glamorous jobs. Which is why one public organization in this country is taking a rather unique approach to recruiting folks from the digital generation. The CBC s technology columnist Tod Maffin explains. For some reason, this file seems to be 10% slower. I have no idea why. Some weird-ass MP3 conversion problem I guess. sigh Why can t this stuff be easy? This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker. ShareThis

It may have been a long time since you ve been in a classroom. And it may not surprise you to know things have become more high tech. But how are today s students of the video game generation forcing their schools to keep up? The CBC s technology columnist Tod Maffin explains. Links: BCIT and nGrain. This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker. ShareThis

Technology industry watchers are keeping a close eye on a unique movement in the geek community a new kind of meeting form where technology enthusiasts show off what they re working on. And many people think it s where the next Google or Microsoft is waiting to be discovered. Good timing too, since Venture Capitalists are back buzzing around technology companies. The CBC s technology columnist Tod Maffin, now, with a peek into this usually hidden world. For more information, check out http://barcamp.org/DemoCamp This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker. ShareThis

From Facebook to Digg. From MySpace to YouTube. If the future of the Internet is in these social networking sites, then the future is very much in jeopardy. And it s all thanks to robots, tiny marketing companies, and greed. At least that s how the CBC s technology columnist Tod Maffin sees it. This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker. ShareThis

First, it was Friendster. Then, MySpace. And now, the place all the so-called cool people visit on the Internet is Facebook. Another day, another Internet fad? Maybe not. Let s find out, with the CBC s technology guy Tod Maffin. Download/Listen to facebook.mp3 This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker. ShareThis

Earlier this month, an employee with the Toronto Star newspaper bought a used notebook computer on eBay. The fellow collects old computers as a hobby. But when he started it up, he discovered more than the usual. He found confidential information from the then-Canadian Alliance party. Turns out, it s a common mistake. Many people just don t KNOW how to clean a computer off before they dispose of it. Here are some tips. Download/Listen to Wiping a Hard Disk Clean (mp3)  This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker. ShareThis

Updated: This is the final version of the short package I produced on the topic. It will air Wednesday and Thursday mornings throughout Canada. Download/listen to tragedy_and_technology.mp3 Here is the q-line (line of suggested questioning) for my technology column on CBC Radio One morning shows. I ll be on the air with the morning show hosts in the following cities: Saint John, Moncton, Corner Brook, Quebec City, Windsor, Sudbury, Whitehorse, Cape Breton (Sydney), and Yellowknife. (Other cities will get a short documentary on the topic, which I ll post here later today or tomorrow.) As the mass shooting in the U.S. Monday unfolded, some students took to the Internet to check in with each other and to grieve. In times of chaos, it seems the Internet is becoming increasingly important for people to connect. The CBC s technology columnist Tod Maffin has been monitoring those so-called social media web sites all this week and he joins me now. 1. What kind of web sites are we talking about here? Well, they re kind of a new class of sites a class that didn t really exist when other tragedies like Columbine or 9/11 happened. As you mentioned, they re known as social media sites and there s three general types. The first are sites that exist to help connect its users to old friends, network through their existing contacts, and so on. MySpace is popular for people who like music or are in their early teens LinkedIn is a social media site for business-people to find new jobs or suppliers and Facebook, which started as a site for University students, but has really expanded in the last couple of months. That s the first group of social media sites. The other are based not around people but around media. So Flickr is very popular for sharing images. YouTube, of course, for video, and so on. And the third group are personal blogs basically online journals where the students write about their lives. 2. When this tragedy unfolded, how were the students using these sites? I found Facebook to be the busiest, and that s probably because a lot of students already had accounts on there. Almost right away after the scope of the tragedy started becoming known on campus, one of the students set up a group on the site called I m Okay and she invited any other students from the campus to Join the Group. Because on this particular site, anyone can look at a group and get a list of its members, you need only look at that list to see if your friend is okay. Then within a couple of hours, rumours start leaking out about who was killed, because their friends can t reach them and they re not coming back to the dorm. So when you look at the blogs or Facebook or MySpace profiles of the dead students, you get a kind of sad chronology of concern. They start out by saying Wow, David, were you near the shooting? then a few hours later it s David, call us, we re worried about you and finally when it s confirmed that they were a victim, most of these people continue to post on their page still addressing them directly as if they were still alive, and it becomes a kind of online memorial. 3. Why do you think students flocked to web sites when this happened, as opposed to setting up on-campus meetings or calling each other. Partially, it s out of necessity. You have to remember that cell phone networks are designed for medium-load, wide-area use. That is to say a healthy number of people using their phones throughout an entire city. When an event like this happens, everyone tries to use their phones and the pattern shifts suddenly to veryhigh-load, small-area use. So a HUGE number of people trying to use their phones within only a couple of kilometer radius. That area might indeed only be served by a couple of cell phone towers at the most. So the space on the cell phone network literally fills up and people can t use their phones. We see this happen time and time again when big events occur. But also it s about the students themselves. Remember, these people have never lived in a world where home computers didn t exist. They were 8 and 9 years old when the Internet started getting popular. And on top of that, this is a TECHNICAL college. Many of these students were studying computers and Internet development, so online social media is completely intertwined with their lives. Many of them probably didn t even consider any other way to communicate this was just the most natural way for them. 4. You mentioned media-based sites like videos and photos. Were people uploading photos that they shot on campus? Well certainly they were. One of the video clips that s being played over and over is a video taken by a student outside the building where shots were being fired. He shot it on his cell phone then uploaded it to CNN who got it on the air within minutes. But something emerged in THIS tragedy that I hadn t seen before and that s people replacing their online photos with an image of a black ribbon and the Virginia Tech logo over it. And one interesting phenomena of these newer sites is they employ a kind of loose categorization scheme known as tagging. So if you have a photo of, say, police running into a dorm building, when you upload it, you use a common tag which is a short word that identifies it like vtshooting. And when I searched for photos from the campus using the obvious tags, most of the images that came up weren t from the campus at all they were images of roses, of a teardrop, of a rainbow.. posted by others around the world as a kind of visual, almost artistic memorial. 5. Are sites like this helpful to journalists in covering a story of this magnitiude? It can be. I mean, certainly once they get the information confirmed from authorities, they can track down web pages of the victims or the suspects. But especially in the U.S. where so many cable news outlets are competing with each other to get a scoop, they can get carried away and jump the gun. I want to play you a clip from Fox News. This is Geraldo Rivera who stumbled upon a Facebook profile of a young Asian students on campus. IN: Here s another shot from that web page RUNS: 0:00 OUT: killing all my girlfriends. Problem is, that wasn t the shooter. That was just someone who matched the description of the shooter. Lucky for Geraldo, he covered up the poor student s face and name before putting it on camera. This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker. ShareThis

Just when you think you ve got your Internet connection at home figured out, along comes yet another technology. But this one promises more than just faster speeds. It might make traditional broadcasters obsolete. The CBC s technology columnist Tod Maffin is here with the details. Download/Listen to tech_wimax_web.mp3 NB: The on-air version of this piece has Michael Jackson s Bad playing at the end; I couldn t include it in this version because of rights so you get some other crappy song instead. Enjoy. This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker. ShareThis

Have you seen those billboards for Bell in huge letters, it says Watch Spiderman on your cell phone! As if we ve all been craving that feature. So I decided to find out how easy it was to find Spiderman and watch it on a movie-compatible Bell phone. Along the way, I explain why the cell phone industry seems intent on selling us more and more features, making our phones increasingly complicated. Some geeky production notes. I wrote this script on a flight to Regina, recorded the interview that night in the Regina casino, voiced it in my hotel room the next day, and mixed it on the flight (and cab ride; see photo to the right) home. All done using Audacity, the free open-source desktop audio workstation. Download/Listen to arpu.mp3 This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker. ShareThis

Here s my technology column for CBC Radio this week (you get to listen to it a day earlier than it actually broadcasts). This will air on regional morning shows Thursday. My take: Sadly, the merger in the U.S. will probably go through. Which will mean a merger up here in Canada as well. I m not really for it, personally, as I think competition helps keep prices down, but then again neither of these companies has made a nickel yet, so maybe it s needed. On a side note, this was the item-from-hell to produce. I nearly finished it in Amadeus Pro, but when my notebook lid was closed it lost contact with my FireWire drive where the audio was and my project was corrupted. So I reinstalled ProTools 7.1 but it s such a finicky program I gave up (too bad, since it cost me hundreds of $$). I ended up mixing it in Audacity, which I have a love/hate relationship with. Anyway. Not my best work, but still not bad. Download/Listen to maffin_satadio.mp3 This is an article from Tod Maffin, a social media strategist, national broadcaster, and leading keynote speaker. ShareThis