This web site is one of Canada’s most frequented blogs. But that’s mostly because of the people who frequent it.
But have you ever wondered who’s actually interested in CBC programming? Here are the bios of The Six Most Frequent Contributors to this blog (in Nov ‘06) (note to program producers: these people are your audience!):
KEMPTON LAM
To me the whole JobLoft thing was so sad. My connection to the JobLoft entrepreneurs was my public blog comments on their original successful pitch and deal and the way their deal eventually blowed up badly and the way they have been poorly handling the aftermath. They can only blame their prof so much. (even they are still 100% behind their prof.)
I am a management consultant/entrepreneur (with a background in computer science and an MBA) specializing in assisting startups to find creative solutions to challenging & interesting problems. At the same time, I also produce documentaries.
I started commenting on CBC Dragons’ Den and then moving on to CBC policies and what I think CBC should do. My comments pattern reflects my personal shift in knowledge and interest as I comment and blog more and more about the US and UK media in my personal blog. I commented frequently because I love CBC. It is my naive hope and dream that the CBC senior management team (even none of them blog) is learning from your blog entries and comments left by everyone including myself. It is a “dialogue” (even it is not a visible one at the moment). I think CBC has the potential to be a great broadcaster on par with or even better than the likes of BBC, NHK, and PBS (I list them in the order of my respect to them). I don’t think CBC is there yet. But the hopes and dreams of many CBC fans remain achievable.
At the same time, I also produced documentaries and attended the 2006
Banff World Television Festival on a CTV Fellowship.
PHILLIP HONG
I am currently on a gap year between high school and college, vacationing and working on my hobby, 148.ca (a internet portal that I am building up for fun). I created my first webpage at age 11, and my first internet broadcast at age 13; the term “nerd” as a label for me is grossly understated.
I grew up in a Chinese-Canadian family, who came to Canada during the
Vietnam War. The reason I comment on insidethecbc.com all the time is
because I am a very avid CBC viewer. I’m probably the private broadcasters’ worst nightmare because even in this digital world, all I watch are Canadian programmes. I remember when I was child, racing home from the school bus stop just to watch “The Urban Peasant”. I’m that crazy about the Ceeb.
DWIGHT WILLIAMS
I live in Ottawa. I bounce between fiction writing, commercial illustration and office work. Currently, I’m putting together the artwork for a police drama/super-hero mini-series entitled Local Hero with a gent named Ian Gould from Australia. We’re hoping to hit the specialty shops with the first issue come Spring of 2007. You can get semi-regular progress reports on that and other stuff I’ve got in the works via
my Livejournal blog, On The DEWLine.
I’ve gotten increasingly entangled — for lack of a better word — within insidethecbc.com postings out of old and still-evolving loyalties and interests, some of which CBC’s assorted programs and projects have helped encourage.
For some reason, CBC inboxes are being flooded with spam messages that have a similar subject line like “Hi, it’s Sue” and “Hi, it’s Dave.” If you’re looking for a quick way to remove these pesky e-rodents from your Groupwise inbox, just follow these simple instructions:
[Read more →]
I’ve fixed a slight bug with the “Make this site my home page” thingy. Just click the button on the top yellow banner to make your Internet Explorer browser open to InsideTheCBC.com by default. (This trick only works for IE users, since that’s the official standard for CBC currently)
The search engine that powers both CBC.ca and radio-canada.ca is a Google Search Appliance (GSA). As such you can use most of the tools and search terms on the commercial site on the CBC.ca search engine.
Query Hacking
Let’s start off with some basics. The search engine by default “OR”s your search terms. That means that if you type in “blue house” (without the quotes) the search engine will return hits that have the word “blue” or “house”. If you would like to force the search engine to “AND” your results then you need to wrap your search term in quotations. This will result in only the exact phrase being matched and returned in your results.
If you would like to omit certain terms from your results, you can prefix them with the negative sign (”-”). If you are looking for information on bass fish (and not related to music at all) you can remove all references to “music” by using “bass -music” (without the quotes) as your search query.
You can restrict your search results to a specific file type by using the “filetype:” query prefix. If you are looking for a specific PDF on our site you can use “filetype:pdf” in your query. “budget filetype:pdf” (Without the quotes) will return all of the pdfs that have the word “budget” in them, on our site. The GSA can index over 100 types of files including binary files such as jpgs, tiffs, psds, and flash content. However, we do not crawl and index these types of files. Only “text” content is indexed (this includes, pdf, doc, xls).
The “site:” query prefix allows you to restrict your query to a specific section of the site. Some of you might remember a while ago that we used to allow the user to restrict their search query to news,sports, or arts, by using the tabs at the top of the search results. That has been gone for a while, but you can still achieve the same thing. For example: You want to find sports stories about Tod Bertuzzi and not stories about his home life in BC. You can use the following query to return only sports stories “Bertuzzi site:www.cbc.ca/sports”. This will return 679 instead of 1380 results (if you did not restrict your search to Sports stories). On the other hand if you want to only view stories from BC you would do: “Bertuzzi site:www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia”
The “site:” query prefix is handy for searching our newsletters. If you want to search the Quirks and Quarks newsletter for “cats” you can use “cats site:interact.cbc.ca/pipermail/quirks” (without the quotes). If you want to search all of our newsletters amend the “site:” prefix to only read “site:interact.cbc.ca/pipermail”
It is important to not put on a trailing slash when you are using the site: query prefix unless of course you want to restrict your search results to that *exact* url and not be recursive.
URL Hacking
Now on to the more advanced stuff. This can only be done by hacking the URL directly. Once you have your search results page you can further change the results by adding items to the results url.
If you would like to get your search results in XML, you need to change two parameters:
1. Remove the proxystylesheet key (proxystylesheet=CBC)
2. Change the “output” key from output=xml_no_dtd to output=xml
For Fun, you can also get the search results using Radio-Canada’s template:
1. Change the proxystylesheet from proxystylesheet=CBC to proxystylesheet=RadioCanada
There are two options for sorting your search results. “By Date” just sorts the results, regardless of relevancy, in chronological order. “By Relevance” orders the results in an order that the GSA will think is the most relevant. You can combine the two, that is sorting by date and relevancy, by editing the sort key:
1. Change the sort key to sort=date:D:S:d1
If you are looking for French content on CBC.ca (and not radio-canada.ca) you can add the “lr” key to the url:
1. Tack on &lr=lang_fr to your search page url.
Ultimately, if you are looking for English pages on Radio-Canada’s site, you can add “&lr=lang_en” to their search results page url.
Things We’re Working On.
Here are some of the “neat” things we’re working on:
Current weather conditions: You can get the current weather conditions in the search results by suffixing your query with “weather”. For example, you can get Toronto’s latest weather conditions by typing in “toronto weather” as your search query. Right now this is only works for a select number of cities.
Latest News: If you use a query that is contained in one of today’s news stories, you will see a link to that news story at the very top of your results highlighted in a blue background.
Feel free to pose any questions about our search engine or suggest any features you’d like to see in a comment. If you would like more technical detail on how to hack our search results you can find them on the Google API page.
CBC Radio One launches a new series January 21 looking at spin — so pervasive it has come to dominate our political, commercial and cultural discourse. Ira Basen looks at the nexus between the media and public relations in Spin Cycles, a series about spin, the spinners and the spun. It runs during the third hour of The Sunday Edition.
Four other series have been extended: Afghanada, the fictional radio drama that probes the war in Afghanistan through the eyes of Canadian soldiers; The Debaters, a debate between Canadian comedians; and The Age of Persuasion which explores how advertising and marketing permeate every aspect of 21st century life; Writer Russell Smith continues his unconventional and provocative look at how language is faring and failing under the strains of contemporary living on And Sometimes Y.
From this morning’s Toronto Star:
CBC-TV’s more-than-moribund 6 p.m. newscasts may be getting a makeover after a management task force announces the results of a four-month-long study to staff tomorrow. CBC-TV executive vice-president Richard Stursberg, radio vice-president Jane Chalmers and CBC News chief Tony Burman will unveil their “vision” via closed-circuit TV.
There were no hints yesterday of what changes will be proposed. Only the most senior managers seem to be in the loop. But the phrase “comprehensive multi-platform news operation” is on many lips.
[More: CBC staffers brace for news]
Bill Dobson, long-time CBC-TV Vancouver news reporter/editor, died this week in Princeton BC at the age of75. He began his career in 1949 at CHUB Nanaimo, later joining CJVI Victoria. He was with CKLG North Vancouver from its startup in 1955 until joining the CBC in 1961. He co-hosted The Best Years series with Joyce Resin starting in 1986, prior to transfering to CBC Radio Vancouver as senior editor, where he retired in 1989. A memorial service will be announced at a future date. [via 
Last Friday, CBC president Robert Rabinovitch sat down for more than an hour to answer a wide range of questions. You can now download the full interview. 
Larry Henderson, the first regular newsreader on CBC’s The National News — later rebranded The National — died this morning in his sleep, his son Graham Henderson confirmed. He was 89.
