matthewgruman.com

Unilever, the company behind products like Dove soap, is driving forest destruction and speeding up climate change by buying palm oil from companies which are destroying Indonesia’s rainforests to make way for palm oil plantations. By their own admission, Unilever is the biggest single user of palm oil in the world.

Unilever pretends to be an environmentally responsible company, but what it is actually responsible for is destroying areas of rainforest, driving species extinction and speeding up global warming. Being one of the biggest users of palm oil on the planet, Unilever must stop buying palm oil from these companies and call for a halt on the destruction of Indonesian forests to grow palm oil.

[…]

No. Greenpeace is not calling for a boycott. We are asking Unilever to act responsibly and to ensure that their products have not been produced at the expense of Indonesian rainforests and the climate. That means that their suppliers are not involved in the continued destruction of these rainforests.

More at Greenpeace.

Via Boing Boing Gadgets.

Via Design You Trust.

I was watching RDI (French-language news station run by the CBC) the other night and came across Jorane and Hawksley Workman‘s performance on Pour un Soir Seulement; it was lovely. The interviews were fantastic: all three (Jorane, Workman, and the interviewer) were bilingual (at least) and there was a great sense of interaction between the languages. Workman, an anglophone, was asked questions in English and answered in English. Jorane, a francophone, was interviewed in the same way but in French. Since they were in the same room, questions were elaborated on by the other musician in whatever language they felt like. Jorane, being asked a question in French, was intercepted by Workman who made a comment in English. Jorane responded in English, then switched back to French to finish the question.

At the end of their final performance, the announcer called the interaction between anglophone and francophone music “agréable.” While it literally translates to “nice”, or “agreeable”, agréable is one of those French words that doesn’t really have a valid English translation (like “frissons” or “entre”). It means more than that. It’s where I wish the anglophone/francophone climate was headed.

A Parti Québécois member of the provincial legislature who wants to create a distinct Quebec identity on the internet will first have to get approval from a United Nations agency.

Longtime sovereigntist Daniel Turp has started a petition to persuade the international authority responsible for internet domain names to create the .qc national extension, similar to Canada’s .ca.

CBC.

Turp explains, apparently unaware of what “autonomous” and “self-governing” mean (hint: they’re the same thing, and neither applies to Québec):

Turp points out that Catalonia, an autonomous region in Spain, has its own national extension — .cat — while the same goes for Greenland, a self-governing province of Denmark, which uses .gl.

First prize to anyone who can think of a more irrelevant waste.

The BBC is reporting that masturbation can help prevent cancer:

They say cancer-causing chemicals could build up in the prostate if men do not ejaculate regularly.

And they say sexual intercourse may not have the same protective effect because of the possibility of contracting a sexually transmitted infection, which could increase men’s cancer risk.

The study was done in Australia; I’m not informed enough of their politics to guess if this is politically/religiously motivated, or just plain weird. The money quote has to be:

Dr Chris Hiley, head of policy and research at the UK’s Prostate Cancer Charity, told BBC News Online: “This is a plausible theory.”

Photo source: Tv, eh?.

Save jPod!

A commenter named D let me know about Save jPod!. The CBC cancelled the TV show, based on the Douglas Coupland book of the same name, on March 7, 2008 after only one season. Save jPod! has been set up to hopefully get the show back on the air, offering a wealth of information about the cancellation and ways to potentially reverse that decision.

Of Petitions and Letters

Save jPod! offers links to a couple of online petitions, which are (unfortunately) mostly useless. Online petitions are the equivalent of a comments section and have absolutely no impact on old media. They offer a ridiculously easy way for people to feel like they’re supporting something, and then give them a reason to feel self-righteous when the petitioned show is eventually cancelled. I would argue that they’re actually detrimental to the cause because they remove the small fraction who would go beyond “signing” the online petition from doing something meaningful.

Luckily, there is also an excellent What You Can Do section that is based in reality. It provides contact mailing addresses, a well-written form letter (trés important), and even a way to connect via telephone from Raugi Yu (Kam Fong from the show) himself. These are excellent ways to get an old media company like CBC (no matter how much they put online, they are still run like old media) to take notice. It shouldn’t be a shock that viewers who are willing to take the time to mail a letter are more important to a corporation than those who can click “submit”.

cbc.ca/jpod

When I first heard about jPod’s cancellation, I was amazed. I thought the show was the perfect way for CBC to start experimenting with the web as a way to distribute their content. The website, however, is awash with problems that could (did?) prevent that success.

Website

The website is a bit absurd. They’ve obviously tried to recreate the quirkiness of the show, but a website is not a television show. When you need to put an “instructions” button, it might be time to step back and rethink quirky VS accessible. There is superfluous background music that plays automatically. Since some scroll bars done in Flash, you can’t use scroll wheels/trackpads to navigate without severe frustration.

However, the site definitely fits into the “cool” category. If I was using it as media, instead of using it to find media (i.e.: the full episodes), I’d love it. They even have a playable version of Defendoid.

Full Episodes

You can watch full episodes online. Excellent idea, poor implementation. They’ve decided to use an awful lightbox-style overlay to house their Flash-based video player that you can’t full screen. During an episode, I had to move the mouse/hit a key to stop my screensaver from coming on and inadvertently stopped the episode three times because of their overlay (clicking anywhere on the page that isn’t video causes the window to close.)

Suggestions

The Website

There are a number of things I would do differently to make the jPod website work better. Obviously, the first step would be to redo the site without Flash as it’s backbone; they can keep the quirkiness without sacrificing the accessibility. Practically everything on the site could be recreated without Flash. It would work faster, increase usability, and allow the CBC to make it more dynamic. It shouldn’t be challenge to find out information about the show.

Full Episodes

The full episodes should be full-screen; that’s easy. If there’s anything your video application can’t do, but YouTube can, it’s time to get back to the drawing board. Sites like Vimeo even offer streaming HD; there’s no reason for these tiny pixelated videos anymore.

They could make “trailers” for each episode, consisting of a particularly good scene, that are easily embeddable. Why? So people like me can post them on their blogs and send readers off to the CBC site to watch the rest of the episode. The audience for jPod probably isn’t going to be watching the CBC Friday nights at nine, but they’re reading blogs.

Grant Funding

The thing about the CBC is that it’s publicly funded, through grants. Yes, they advertise too, but the majority is from the government. It’s out national TV station and has a mandate to promote Canadian culture. They might be old media, but they aren’t stupid or completely unaware of how the Internet works. About eight years ago, they launched New Music Canada as a Canadian alternative to sites like the old mp3.com. If you signed up as a musician and promoted the site on yours, you got a free t-shirt (I still wear mine) and other great swag. For 2000, that was a very forward-thinking idea. Sure, the site was a bit of a disaster, but they used their experience and constantly redeveloped until they ended up with something good.

So where is the problem in using jPod as their vehicle to understand video on the web? The show is going to have a more international audience than most of their shows because of the content (drug, sex, and video games); it seems perfect for online distribution. It’s already techy (the characters work at “Neotronic Arts”; an allusion to Electronic Arts) and would probably be embraced by the geek community.

Save jPod

If you’ve never seen the show, head on over to the website and watch a couple of episodes. If you like it, please check out some of the options at Save jPod! and do what you can to keep it on the air/Internet.

UPDATE: A comment from Firefly (thanks!) led me over to her site which has some great commentary on jPod’s cancellation and the state of Canadian content on TV.

Apparently, John Mayer did a one-off TV show for VH1 back in 2004 and it’s HILARIOUS.

Via Cho.

I just saw a TV commercial for Maxwell House’s Brew Some Good campaign (cannot find a video online). It was a really simple cup of coffee with captions reading (paraphrased, especially the numbers):

The average TV commercial costs $27, 000. This one cost $18, 000. What should we do with the difference? Nominate a charity at www.brewsomegood.ca

There’s also another that says “[I]nstead of making an expensive TV commercial, we funded an inner-city youth music program” with two kids playing music in the background. It also invites you to visit the website to nominate a charity.

Effective Marketing

I absolutely love this. Even if it’s only a blatant PR move with no benevolent meaning, I still think it’s great. The TV commercials, because they’re so simple, make you appreciate the break and pay attention. They’re being open about money and spending, they’ve got cute kids; everything makes you feel good about Maxwell House. Nominating isn’t just an easy way to feel like you’re contributing to a good cause, you’re actually giving to a good cause. With all the fighting between Starbucks and McCafés, Maxwell House is now a way to buy good feelings at the grocery store.

And coming down to it, they really are doing a good thing.

brewsomegood.ca

The one unfortunate thing I can say about the campaign is that the website is a pretty bad idea. It’s all in Flash, loader and all. It doesn’t work at all on Safari for Mac OS. I first thought maybe it was a connection issue, but it didn’t matter since there was no alternative anyway. It did work in Firefox, but the main part of the site doesn’t have content. The Nominate option does work.

I’m sure the content issue is just bad timing, but it would have been a better idea to follow the simplicity of their TV commercials and create a website that was equally effective.

Follow the Leader?

Aside from the website, I really hope that this campaign works and other companies take notice. It seems like the perfect trade-off for being “forced” to see ads.

One day at work, Melnick took the usual bathroom break when a light bulb went off: He wondered if a plume of contaminated water droplets was ejected into the air every time a toilet flushed.
[...]
During the study, gauze pads were placed around the experimental bathroom. Close-up photos of the germy ejecta, according to Gerba, looked like “Baghdad at night during an air attack.” The study showed that significant quantities of microbes floated around the bathroom for at least two hours after each flush. Gerba discovered that a lot of virus fell on those gauze pads.
[...]
“If an alien came from space and studied the bacterial counts, he probably would conclude he should wash his hands in your toilet and crap in your sink,” says Dr. Germ, with cheerful bluntness.

The Naked Scientists.