We had a great weekend this last weekend here in Montreal. Yesterday, June 24, was Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day here in Quebec -- the national holiday of this cool and fun nation.
St. Jean Baptiste is important to me in a lot of ways. Of course, it's cool that it's the national holiday of our adopted new home. But John the Baptist, the patron saint of Quebec, is also our family's name saint. ''Prodromos'' means "forerunner" in Greek, and it's one of the titles of St. John.
Most of all, it's the day that Maj and I moved to Montreal. We came in on St. Jean Baptiste Day, 2003, and we've been here ever since. We drove my beautiful 1972 Citroën DS from San Francisco, where my niece Elena had just been born, all the way out here. We arrives on June 24th and wandered around the McGill Ghetto looking for our sight-unseen sublet. It's hard to believe it's only been 4 years -- it seems like so much longer.
We had a good day yesterday. The three of us went to Piknic in the afternoon and hung out with our friends Jeremy and Lina and their two great kids Clea and Sylvie. We had a lot of hummus and pasta salad and bread and cheese and generally had a great time. Meg and Catherine came and hung out for a while, and also our friend Kristen, who's 7 months pregnant and has a 10-month-old. Good luck on that one.
Most of all a pretty day enjoying the outdoors in our new home town, as well as fun dancing to house under a big Calder statue. How great is that?
tags: montreal quebec stjeanbaptiste prodromou piknic jeremy lina
72 hours from Flickr
I forgot to mention that we had a really nice time on Friday evening going to the 24 Hours of Flickr party at the SAT. Heather Champ, community leader at Flickr and welcomer to partiers, put it well: "We have three requirements for Flickr parties: the food must be good, the drinks must be copious, and the schwag must be ample."
And that's exactly what happened. All the usual Montreal suspects were out in force: YULblog types, Web entrepreneurs, Web pranksters. It was great seeing m-c and c-c, who wore their awesome Flickr Socks -- although they each had a matching pair.
I also talked to Allen Morris, which was really fun. He's a developer living now in Saranac Lake, one of the towns in the Adirondacks I find strangely compelling. We exchanged GPG key signatures and talked a lot about the Bay Area (California), where we both once lived.
Probably my best talk was with Heather Champ and Derek Powazek. We talked about their joys of creation of JPG Magazine, the despair of leaving it, and looking forward to the future. We also chatted a lot about print on demand technologies, which we're evaluating for Wikitravel.
Heather took the photo of my friend Ben Cerveny at Burning Man that's become his avatar icon on about every social software platform I know of. It must be good to capture someone in the way they want to think of themselves. I took my own self-concept picture by putting the camera on the dashboard of my Citroen. Heh.
All in all a good party. One thing I was interested to find out was that there's a Yahoo! Quebec, which launched last month and I guess just slipped by me. Sadly, if you click on the "English" button, it takes you to... Yahoo! Canada. Hey, Yahoo! There are actually a lot of anglophones here! Just in case you were wondering.
tags: yahooquebec 24heuresflickrmontreal 24hoursflickrmontreal flickr montreal party
Montreal Web Development Book Club
Montreal Web scene stalwart Heri Rakotomalala -- the man with the magic name, originally from Madagascar, along with Montevideo and Marfa, one of the M-places on my travel wishlist -- recently started a Montreal Web Development Book Club. It's a meeting for people interested in the practical side of the Web to talk about the books they read and let that drift into talk about the work we do and ideas we have.
I think the book club is an awesome idea. Book clubs are a great grass-roots intellectual meetup that we don't often celebrate in the post-flash mob BarCamp-ized world. The great thing about a book club, for Web people, is that it filters out the bullshitters and dilettantes. If you're going to a book club, you're going to have to know what you're talking about, and you're going to have to care about the subject. The book gives focus that keeps the conversation from drifting to tangential topics. Flakes and hangers-on just don't have the stamina for it.
Also, we met at Laïka, so it was nice to have some beers in a good place on a hot night. Why not?
We managed to talk about a lot of good books, too. Jean-François <something> (I didn't get his last name) talked about In Search of Stupidity, a look at the last 25 years of marketing and business blunders in the high-tech realm. Our industry is subject to a lot of decisions that seem absolutely self-defeating in hindsight, and the book goes in-depth on 15 case studies -- like Wordstar, Ashton-Tate and Borland. It sounds like a great cautionary tale for Web 2.0 startup mavens.
Heri talked about the book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web -- the infamous "Polar Bear Book". It sounds like a really good book for doing initial planning for a Web site, but I'm really interested in tools for profiling an IA effort. We get about 2 million unique visitors a month at Wikitravel, for example, which is a huge amount of usability data I could be mining. But I don't really have the tools for it, so I don't do it much.
I'd love to know, for example, about people who land on a Wikitravel page from a search engine and then leave. What were they looking for? Why couldn't they find it? Also, users who browse through our pages clicking on links, then resort to a full-text search. What did they think they were clicking on, and what were they looking for instead? Did they find it? How can we put that in front of them in the first place?
Most of all, I want to know how and why people start editing Wikitravel pages, and why they stop. Of people who click the "edit" button, only 1 in 17 click "save". (That is one bit of clickpath analysis I've done.) Why? I've often been tempted to put a survey up when someone navigates away from our edit page. "Why didn't you save? Tell us so we can fix it for other people."
I talked about the book I just finished reading a few weeks ago, Everything is Miscellaneous. It's the latest book by Dave Weinberger about how we impose order on information to make it easy to understand and retrieve. It's an awesome book -- really fun -- especially for someone married to a knowledge management expert. I don't think I gave a good enough description of the book to ignite the club's interest, but I hope they check it out, because it's really readable and good.
At the end of the meeting Heri took a poll and decided that we'll continue doing the book club on the last Monday of the month. I've already picked out my book for next month: RESTful Web Services. I've heard good things about this book (admittedly mostly from the co-author Leonard Richardson) and I want to give it a look-see. So book-club fodder it is.
''Update: Heri has his own book club report here.''