newmediaMike

10th Anniversary of an end to an era

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Today is an anniversary of an event that influenced my life for a long time and had a crushing effect on the new media industry in Canada as a whole.

10 years ago I was working for Multimedia Trade Shows selling exhibit space for the annual trade show and conference held every spring at the Metro Toronto Convention Center. In the fall of 1998 the management of Multimedia Trade Shows sold the show to an American company, Advanstar.

Advanstar was a very successful US exhibition company and ran various shows in different verticals all across the US. Multimedia Trade Shows was their first Canadian venture. In the fall of 1998 we were coming off a very successful newMedia98 and our booth sales were ahead of the previous year.

I should backtrack a bit here. When we sold exhibit space for the show it took us most of the year to do so, with almost 60% of our sales coming in the last 6 weeks before the show. Contrast that to a big American show (anyone remember Comdex?) where they sold the next show out at the current show. I remember going to Comdex here in Toronto on the first day of the show and ending up behind my Comdex counterpart as he went around trying to sell the Canadian exhibitors their booth space for the following year. The exhibitors were not too pleased at his tactics. For the new American owners of the New Media show even though we were ahead of the previous year, in their view we were behind. Because we were so far behind they decided to move the sales to the US and my contract was terminated on December 16. 10 years ago today.The move was made because they thought they could do a better job selling to Canadians then we could.

For me it meant I was out of a job just before Christmas. I looked at it as an opportunity to try my hand at web design and a new practice called search engine optimization. After a quick study of what meta tags were and how Yahoo (the only directory/engine worth anything at the time) worked I was able to savour my first taste of SEO victory, scoring the Top 10 positions for my first website - mediaworx.to - for the keywords SEO and Search Engine Optimization. Yes you read that right - the Top 10 all to myself for about a week. A small victory but a victory nonetheless. I also started writing articles for Visual Convergence, a magazine I would later become the editor of.

The New Media show lasted one more disastrous year before Advanstar gave up on the Canadian market. In the process Canada lost our only trade event at the time geared towards the new media industry. Today of course all the major shows are just memories. Who needs a trade show when you have the internet, blogs and Twitter to learn about new media technologies?

Notice:
This piece is an editorial and is my personal opinion of the events of the time.

Post Script - I just read that Apple announced today that they are pulling out of MacWorld, December 16 sure is going down as a bad day for the exhibition industry, IMHO.

Tags: Advanstar, Comdex, Multimedia Trade Shows, newMedia, trade show

2 more reasons to love GMail

My love affair with GMail continues, and you all get to share the love!

Thanks to Mark Evans over at Twitterati,  I learned how to add Twitter to GMail.It’s a crude gadget that allows you to twit from your GMail dashboard. Since I hve migrated all of my email addresses to GMail I now keep a GMail tab open on my browser all day so I may check out Twitter a bit more during the day.

When I was adding the Twitter gadget I noticed Gmail added yet another Labs feature that will let you send text SMS messages to peers on your Gmail chat list.

It kinda ticked me off that this is only available for US telephone numbers now, but they are planning to introduce it to other parts of the world soon.

According to the official blog,

This is why we built a way to chat with your friends even when they’re away from their computers. Now you can keep the conversations going with a new Labs feature that lets you send SMS text messages right from Gmail. It combines the best parts of IM and texting: you chat from the comfort of your computer, and your friends can peck out replies on their little keyboards.

I think I can see the practicality in that. What do you think?

Tags: Gmail, Google, SMS

WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” is here

At WordCamp Toronto Matt talked about WP2.7 and a brief demo was given. But the wait is over! WordPress 2.7 is here and the new dashboard is clean and sweet, just like Matt promised.

I have the Automatic Upgrade installed so it was a cinch for me to upgrade to 2.7. I highly recommend you install Automatic Upgrade before you upgrade. I will warn you though of one small bug. My plug-ins were not automatically re-installed. Not a big issue as I don’t use many plug-ins, but still an issue to look out for.

I’m looking around as I’m writing this and seeing some of the features.  The dashboard is  now customizable. You can move modules around to suite your tastes and workflow. YOu can give yourself more space on he dashboard by making the side navigation bar smaller. It might look like you acn drag the bar to make it smaller or larger, but all you have to do is click on it to enlarge or shrink the side nav bar.

Did I mention the Navigation Bar? The whole look of the dashboard is reminiscent of other applications. It reminds me a lot of GMail and other mail programs. Not a complaint, just an observation.

If you have the plug in for Twitter Tools it now asks you upfront if you want to Tweet about this post, which is also nice.

I’ll post more in a couple of days, but in the meantime I’m going to explore WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” - aptly named as it is cool and smooth as jazz.

How to add Tasks to GMail

Yesterday and this morning the Twittervese was buzzing (bet you thought I was going to say all a Twitter again didn’t you?)  about a new feature on GMail.

Tasks. Which is a great idea, to integrate into GMail because some us spend a lot of time in GMail. I am finding that GMail is one of the most useful apps online for me right now. I have different emails for various hats I wear. I found myself spending a lot of time checking each individual mailbox. But last week I decided to merge all of my emails into one email box and that is GMail. All of my emails will be re-directed to newmediamike {-at-} gmail.com.

Al right I’m getting side tracked here.

Tasks on GMail.

It took some digging but I found out how to turn on Tasks, and in the interests of Public Service I am sharing them here with you.

Of course youhave to be logged into your GMail account. To enable Tasks, go to Settings, click the Labs tab. Select “Enable” next to “Tasks” and then click “Save Changes” at the bottom. Then, after GMail refreshes, on the left under the “Contacts” link, you’ll see a “Tasks” link. Just click it to get started. Adding a new task is just a matter of clicking inside an empty part of one’s list, typing, and hitting return. E-mail messages can also be converted to Tasks using the menu More Actions/Add To Tasks.

While I was in the Labs tab I also found a Gadget to integrate my Google Calendar into GMail. So now in one window I can check my calendar and my email and my tasks. GMail now has as much online functionality as Outlook does for the desktop. For a mobile warrior like myself who is in a client’s office every day it is a godsend. Plus for the few of us remaining who aren’t tethered to a Blackberry or iPhone we can access these features on our mobile phones.

Tags: Gmail, Tasks