Today was voting day in the 2008 Canadian Federal Election. I just got back from voting, and thankfully the polling station was nearby (just as with the Ontario Provincial Election last year), being only a five-minute walk away from my building.

I headed over there right after work and was surprised to see that the polling station was not busy at all. It was in the gymnasium of a secondary school and I was the only person voting at the time. (Though I did see people coming in on my way out) Perhaps this was to be expected, as Belleville is a community with quite a few retirees who probably voted earlier in the day.

The staff were quite courteous and made the process as simple as possible, which is especially important for older voters. I’m quite thankful to have Elections Canada overseeing the vote in Canada, and I just can’t imagine why they don’t have such standards in the US, which undoubtedly contributed to the controversy surrounding the 2000 Presidential elections.

This election has also been one with a great presence on the Internet, much to my liking. The Internet is already a place that many turn to for their daily fix of news, information and commentary. Many, such as myself, are already using it as their prime source of news, having grown tired of traditional media. Even my Mom, a self-described computer-illiterate, has taken to using YouTube for elections updates, albeit through the CBC Channel.

Speaking of the CBC, their coverage has been pretty decent, but more importantly, they’ve launched a massive effort to get local with their elections coverage. They’ve nicely put together a page with all the ridings, each listing the riding’s profile, the candidates’ profiles, the 2006 election results and a message board, which they mistakenly describe as a “blog”.

It’s a step in the right direction, but could stand to be more interactive and even more local. For example, a dedicated reporter for each riding could update a real blog about the issues for that riding. A calendar could also provide details about upcoming events, such as candidates’ debates. Of course, all of this information is already available online, but aggregating it could be of some value. People want web sites and services to be local, offering information that’s directly relevant to them and their community, and no where is this more important than during elections.

Just over a month ago, the CBC launched their Great Canadian Wish List project on Facebook. Reaching out to the young people of Canada (who use Facebook), the project aims to gauge “grassroots” support among them by allowing users to create a “wish” or cause that others can then support. The most popular “wishes” will then be made part of the CBC’s Canada Day coverage special. With so many issues facing our modern Western society, the project had lofty goals in attempting to stoke the interests of youth. However, as expected, the “wish list” has mostly descended into another yet another debate on abortion, and gay marriage.

Burn baby, burn

Despite this being the CBC, I don’t believe they could’ve been this clueless. While the Wish List had noble aims - that is, seeing what was really on the minds of young Canadians - it’s all too easy for such a venue to become overrun by polarizing issues, especially in North America. Any sort of “debate” on the Internet almost invariably devolves into a flame war - it is rare to see a well-rounded debate here, since there are no real moderators, and all it takes is one bad apple to ignite the volatile mixture.

Thus, you can see how it didn’t take long for “Abolish Abortion in Canada” and “I wish that Canada would remain pro-choice” to become the two top wishes on the list. Gay marriage, the Paris Hilton of debate issues (in terms of relevance) isn’t far behind in the polls. The numbers change constantly, and so does the leading wish, as people from both camps attempt to rally “grassroots” support amongst the users of Facebook. Of course, the accuracy of these numbers at determining “true” national opinion on these issues is suspect. First of all, it’s a voluntary Internet poll, so by definition it is limited to only those who care for using the Internet to express their views. Secondly, it’s limited to Facebook users. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the polls aren’t limited to Canadians, so obviously issues that are popular in America are going to rise to the top here.

Godwin’s Law invoked

One of my biggest peeves with online debate is the ease with which preposterous comparisons and straw-man attacks reign supreme. Evidently, most people who’ve never even heard of logical fallacies think it’s a brilliant idea to compare an argument to something horrible, in an attempt to draw the negative emotional response associated with it. For example, take a look at this comments page in response to an anti-abortion/pro-life article that was part of the Great Canadian Wish List project. As expected, there are a plethora of responses, and I count no fewer than four references to “Hitler” - supporting both sides of the debate! This was actually a relatively good “Internet debate”, as far as my experience goes, and yet we still could not avoid the “Reductio ad Hitlerum” fallacy.

I still don’t know why this persists, especially in online debate. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that you can espouse a ridiculous argument over the Internet, and not look like a fool behind its protective wall. Godwin’s Law has been around since 1990 - that’s right, 1990, before there was even a real Web, and dial-up was a luxury only real geeks could afford. (Or sacrifice to obtain) Godwin’s Law is perhaps one of the things about the Internet that will never change - remarkable for something that often changes so fast.

Fanning the flames of discontent

However large my distaste for logically misconstrued arguments is, my real problem is not with the participants of this project, but rather with the CBC itself. They must have known that this “Great Canadian Wish List”, with its prospects of getting prime time news coverage to any topic that had great “grassroots” support, would have been divisive and bitter. And yet, they chose to go ahead with it anyway, using one of the largest and most active social networks, Facebook, as their launching platform. The issues brought forth may not even be of true major concern to most Canadians (since apparently anyone can vote), and furthermore the numbers may not be truly representative. However, the appearance is impressive, thanks to outspoken groups on both sides.

It’s hard to say whether the numbers of supports are really indicative of grassroots support, or rather due to an organized few. For example, it was recently revealed that 99% FCC complaints about aired TV content are due to a single activist group - the Parents Television Council. With their efforts, complaints skyrocketed from a mere 350 complaints in 2000 to a whopping 240,000 in 2003. (Reminds me of that time Stephen Colbert tried to get that bridge named after him.) Without this knowledge, one would think that the massive increase in complaints filed to the FCC was due to some sort of revival of “morals” or a huge increase in objectionable content on TV, or both. Clearly, this is not the case.

The chances of this occurring with something like CBC’s Great Canada Wish List are all too high. Not only do the loudest groups get their views promoted to the top on Facebook, but they also get the resultant mess aired on CBC, and their issues brought to the forefront, no matter how divisive or irrelevant. Never mind that the results may not be accurate, even in the context of Internet polls, and never mind that Canadians aren’t the only ones participating in the polls - this was all done to provide a nice ratings boost and a little something different than traditional Canada day coverage.

Shame on you CBC, shame on you.

CBC.ca has recently redesigned their front page, just about a year after they underwent a major redesign, incorporating a mostly standards-based approach. While there doesn’t seem to be a big change, they’ve made a few small changes to direct their readers’ focus to different areas. For example, three big blocks in a horizontal row (with accompanying images) now direct users to the top stories in news, sports and arts & entertainment. Even more attention is drawn to the big header at the top of the page, that is used to focus users’ attention to the CBC’s traditional media offerings on TV and radio, headlining what major shows will be airing that day. One might wonder why the CBC is attempting to push people back to traditional media when online media is all the rage nowadays.

While I find the new design to be refreshing and more visually attractive, there are some deficits with it.

First, the good

The changes to the front page, as mentioned, haven’t been that big, and while some may think this is lazy, it’s actually a good idea when you have a huge and varied user base. People like familiarity (see the Active User Paradox), and a huge change would likely disrupt them for long enough to see a drop off in readership. By making small incremental changes, you can get a wide and varied user base to accept your new layout slowly over time.

One of the other nice things they added was the weather display at the top of the page, since “weather” was consistently a top search at the CBC.ca site. Rather than force a user to pick their city, the weather panel automatically finds your current city based on a geo-IP address lookup. (This I assume) You can, of course, manually select a city if you want, or if the process can’t find your city. This same process is used to display Local News (if available), but this is at the bottom of the page after most of the stuff on the front page.

Navigating to the News Page, (one of the four new main links - News, Sports, Radio and TV), you’ll find a page that looks curiously like the old CBC.ca front page. If you miss the old front page, you’ll just want to visit this page instead of the new one. Here, a single headline story is emphasized, followed by “Top Stories”, three more headliners, and then a bunch of sections. New to this page is the addition of a tab for “Most Blogged” stories. This feature uses Technorati to find incoming links to CBC.ca stories to find out how popular a particular story is. There’s also a side panel linking to the blogs of CBC journalists, so you can keep up to date with what they’re doing. Kudos to the CBC for acknowledging the importance that blogs play in online news, however, this can obviously be a double-edged sword, as stories like “Hasselhoff gets sole custody of teen daughters” will get top spot. (Who cares? Just because he was a Wendy’s spokesman?)

Lastly, they moved non-news stuff like the “Diversions” and games section down to the bottom, leaving only news-related items near the top of the page. In my opinion this was a good thing, since if you go to a news site, you should be wanting to find news. However, games-related searches currently occupy three of the top 10 searches on the CBC.ca site, so maybe I’m not in agreement with the masses on this one.

The Bad

Strangely, most of the rest of the site hasn’t been updated to the new layout. Individual stories such as this one remain under the old layout, potentially confusing users who generally don’t having to switch back and forth between layouts, especially on the same site. Perhaps they’ll slowly roll-over the stories to the new layout, but keeping two layouts simultaneously definitely is not a good thing. So far, only the major pages such as News, Sports and Radio/TV have been updated to the new layout, as far as I can tell.

The main navigation bar, containing “News”, “Sports”, “Radio” and “TV” as options is also a bit weird. Firstly, it’s location is a bit out of place - it’s slightly offset into the main header of the page, and while this isn’t bad per se, it just doesn’t fit in with the flow of the rest of the site, which doesn’t use this technique. For that reason, it looks tacked on - like a band-aid on the scrape of a child’s knee. The choice of options is also a bit perplexing. Firstly, including TV and Radio, in addition to the main page header being a conduit for TV/Radio listings, one has to wonder if CBC.ca is really committed to online news, or is merely being a cheerleader for their traditional media offerings. And, while “Sports” was an obvious option for a main header, what happened to Business/Finance? It’s apparently been relegated to a small text link hidden somewhere in the front page.

And, while on the news portal page, news is up-front and center, on the main front page, a good portion is taken up by the header pointing you towards TV/Radio. In fact, if you know about the Golden F in usability, you’ll realize that most people will only really look at this part of the page, and won’t see much of the news.

Perhaps this was intended - CBC.ca has to be more than just news, and has to cover all aspects of the broadcasting corporation, with TV and radio being their staple. Sort of like the difference between ABC.com and ABCNews.com. However, the old site didn’t make this distinction, and seemed to work well for most people. Hopefully people will get used to this separation in the future.

The Ugly

Of course, what I say doesn’t matter too much. (Though I like to think that it does) What really matters is what the overall readership base thinks, and CBC knows this, so that’s why they crafted a letter to their audience requesting feedback. In it, Steve Billinger, Executive Director at CBC, says:

We’re listening to you; we know you’re looking for these technological innovations—and it’s our job at CBC to give them to you. The digital media landscape is constantly evolving, with new innovations being developed every day—and Canadians expect us to be ahead of the curve. This is why millions of you come to CBC.ca every day for the latest in news, arts, entertainment and sports.

We’ve already launched our News and Sports portals, with Entertainment and other sites to follow later this summer. Enjoy, and thanks for visiting.

Okay, so maybe we will get more options other than just News/Sports/TV/Radio in the main navigation. But I still don’t get why they’re trying to divert so many people back to TV when they’re talking about the digital media landscape at the same time.

But what do the people think? An informal survey of their comments to the CBC regarding the new design shows that maybe 1/3rd to 1/2 of the people posted negative reviews of the new design. Keep in mind, this was an informal poll - the only people that wanted to say something were part of it. Generally speaking, people with negative opinions tend to voice them louder than those with neutral or good ones.