The massive image rotator that used to consume the top of the screen is gone replaced by much more news and sports content. The new page packs in more stories, and longer headlines. Shockingly, it’s also aligned in the centre of the page.

With the renewed newsy feel to the page, Radio and Televison programming has been given less prominence.

Check out the new page here. What do you think?

I’ve never seen this kind of overlay advertising on cbc.ca before. It’s obviously something new. As you can see in the picture the ads appear at the bottom of the page.

Anybody know anything about this new feature?

The opening match of the tournament drew 269,000 total streams, that’s about a third the size of the television audience of 900,000.

That ratio is much higher than online numbers for the Stanley Cup. For instance the final game between Pittsburgh and Montreal drew 130,000 views online, yet the television audience was 4.2 million.

O’Malley’s has been blogging for MacLeans for the last three years, prior to that she freelanced for the Hill Times. In more than 10 years of working on the Hill she’s earned a reputation for cutting through the crap and speaking plainly about politics. O’Malley is also a geek – she prefers the term ‘blogatrix’ to describe her work – but either way O’Malley is technologically savvy and immediate - she blogs using two Blackberry’s simultaneously because there is no wireless internet coverage on Parliament.

“What I love about live blogging is that it’s kind of without a net, which means that when something happens I write what my immediate reaction is… I love the fact that it is real time,” she said in this video.

In addition to blogging at cbc.ca O’Malley will also be contributing to radio, television and online.

The frienenemy arrangement was announced in a press release this afternoon, and is effective immediately. It allows the post to republish sports stories in the online national post and sometimes in the newspaper. The CBC will run daily financial stories and podcasts from the Financial Post in cbc.ca’s Money section.

Although the two seem like strange bedfellows there’s a certain strategic logic to the move. The Financial Post has long-standing reputation for its financial coverage, while the CBC excels at sports coverage, especially hockey coverage. Obviously both organizations are straining to get through the recession, and this move would seem to allow both to either increase the number of stories they can deliver or cut back on staff.

The financial details of the move were not disclosed, however it’s worth noting that the CBC has the dominant position in the deal. The CBC’s online audience is much larger than the Financial Post’s, according to Alexa ( an internet traffic ranking service ) the CBC site is the ranked 36th in Canada, while the Financial Post is 1,095. The deal will allow the CBC to firm up its financial section, which is of interest to certain advertisers.

The portal is meant to capitalize on the growth of online video viewing and the steady integration of television and the internet. “This is definitely a significant step in our long-term vision,” Rob Fullerton, the product manager for online video, said today. He said he hopes the audience will come to see the new video portal as a “single destination” for shows, news, sports and live events. He said the new video page is “the best we’ve seen in the industry.”

South of the border, Fox and NBC, capitalized on the growth of online video with their aggregate video player, Hulu. This summer comScore reported that Hulu had become the third most popular video site on the internet, attracting 380 million views in one month. Unlike YouTube, Hulu has also attracted a considerable amount of interest from advertisers. Shortly after the site was launched all of their commercial inventory was sold out.

The CBC video portal is tailored for longer video viewing. The clips are high quality and often full episodes, unlike the shorter clips that you usually find on YouTube.

The content is also chaptered, with ads at the beginning and in the middle of the content, similar to what you would see on TV.

Fullerton said he’s looking for feedback. “It’s important to note we definitely do not see this as the final product,” he wrote Monday afternoon in an email. “One of the reasons we chose to launch at this time is to get feedback from our audience on what they like (and don’t like?) about this media player experience.”

So, what do you think of the new video portal?

Earlier this week CBC.ca launched a brand new weather section. The new weather section has been re-written from the ground up using some pretty cool technology to get the forecast to our users as quickly as possible.

Automatic Location Detection
Using technology from our Content Delivery Network, Akamai, we’re able to figure out with 95% accuracy where in Canada you are visiting the website. We take this information and automatically redirect you to the closest weather station.

This technology isn’t perfect, so you might not get your preferred location automatically. If that happens, just type in a location you would like to the the weather for and click on the “set as my default” link to save your preferences.

Easier To Read Forecasts
The weather pages now include larger icons and text to better understand the forecasted weather. In addition, we have included radar and temperature maps from the CBC Weather Centre on every page. We have also included a handy way to change between Celsius and Fahrenheit temperatures!

Improved Weather Warnings
The weather warnings now link directly to Environment Canada. As well, on the front of every regional page, you will get a list of warnings that affect the region.

How It All Works
CBC gets weather data from a variety of sources including: Environment Canada, WSI, and our own Weather Centre. These various feeds are delivered to CBC.ca where a Java application called “weatherconditions” parses the data and outputs it as flat HTML to the website.

The application uses two libraries to do the heavy lifting. One called “smooks” to parse and process the XML and CSV data that we get from the data sources. The other is called “freemarker“, which is a templating language to place the various pieces of information on the HTML pages.

The weatherconditions application is constantly running on our server and processes the data sources every 15 minutes.

The California-based search and web services company made the decision to shelve Maven last week. The sudden move will force the CBC to find a new video software provider by year-end.

The CBC had entered into a relationship with Maven Networks prior to the later’s acquisition by Yahoo in 2008 for $160 million.

Now the CBC must scramble to switch several thousand videos to a new content provider and figure out a transition plan in next several months. Nevertheless, the move is being well received at the CBC, many of the producers that used the Maven product were unhappy with it.

What did you think of Maven?

Allegations from Manitoba aboriginal leaders that the CBC has provided a forum for hatred and racism on it’s web site have grown into a full scale debate between hate speech on one hand and freedom of speech and censorship on the other.

The leaders, which represent dozens of aboriginal bands, made the allegations after a year-long study of several news sites. One of the comments which they documented read: “Native people do not have the knowledge to look after a house. Build them a teepee seeing they were better off 300 years ago.”

When CBC News posted the story on its web site headlined: “First Nations chiefs say comments on CBC website forum for hate,” hundreds of comments started appearing on the page debating the merits of the accusations. On Thursday night the story had over 200 comments and was the most commented story on cbc.ca.

Many of the comments echoed the thought that the aboriginal leaders were blurring the lines between criticism and hatred. “I don’t think people’s opinions should be counted as racist because they may be negative in nature,” MikeNike wrote in what was the most recommended comment on the story. “This sounds like intimidation to me… Dissenting points of view are not hate speech,” another commentator GlobalWarmingNews.ca added. I should add that the CBC story did not contain the comments that sparked the allegations.

Nevertheless the story illustrates a problem that many media outlets are struggling with – sometimes the online comments become the story. And when that happens it introduces some thorny legal questions.

A media law professor told the Globe said that the CBC could be liable for the comments: “If you are screening the comments, you are responsible,” said Dean Jobb, assistant professor of Journalism at King’s College. But others disagree wether the CBC would be on the hook and most agree that the issue lies in a legal grey area than has not been mapped.

The problem becomes even more acute for the CBC because part of it’s mandate is to promote discussion among Canadians, and comments on news stories are a extremely effective way to do that.

There have been some subtle changes to the site that havn’t really been advertised. I’ve taken a moment to outline them for you:

Mobile Site Revamp
There were two major changes to our mobile website. The first was the outsourcing of the site to a third party called Quattro Wireless. They allow us to automatically reformat the mobile site depending on which device you are using. So the site you see on your Blackberry will be formatted for the Blackberry. While a visitor from a cell phone will have the cell phone version of the site displayed to them properly.

The second change we made was to automatically detect if users are coming from a mobile device if they visit www.cbc.ca. If they are, then they will automatically be directed to our mobile site: m.cbc.ca. There were a few bugs with this auto-redirection, but they have been ironed out this week.

This way, you have one url you need to remember: cbc.ca. If you visit from a phone, blackberry, or desktop, you will automatically be sent to either the mobile or regular website.

Flash Video
We have had flash video on the site for a while now. We’ve recently rolled this out to the news areas of the site, specifically The National.

This new video format allows us to provide higher quality video at a lower bit rate. It also allows us to almost guarantee that the video will be played on all platforms as the flash format is supported in most browsers.

You can expect to see Flash video to slowly replace all the windows and real media video on the site. We are currently testing live streaming with the flash player as well.

Anything Else?
There are some pretty cool projects going on that I will reveal over the course of this year as they roll out. So stay tuned!

A study that looks at the online buzz generated by Canada’s top media outlets has CBC ahead by a mile.

The study looks at online mentions and comments posted on blogs, forums, social networks and social media sites like Twitter, YouTube, Myspace and many others. CBC’s web sites generated both the most mentions and the most comments.

The CBC site received almost double the number of mentions of it’s closest competitor, the Globe and Mail, with 2,858 mentions, versus the Globe’s 1,501 mentions.

But it was in the comments that cbc.ca really excelled. The site received almost four times the number of comments of its nearest competitor.

CBC.ca leads the pack in social media buzz

The authors of the study, Chicago-based Cision, said comments to the links are relevant because it shows that people who use social networking features on the web are engaged with the content.

Jay Krall, Cision’s manager of Internet media research, said while ad budgets shrink, blogs and other buzz-generating online content like video are the future in news.

“Any advertiser who’s looking at social metrics is already a step ahead,” he says. While traditional measuring of eyeballs and clicks is still relevant, the social media ranking provides more information as to the engagement and reach of online content, he adds.

The research was done for Media in Canada, you can read more about it here.

CBC.ca has moved from the second floor up to the ninth floor over the course of the past two weeks. Us, along with the finance department were the first “guinea pigs” for the office space redesign.

Because this is going to be our permanent home, we were literally given keys to the blueprint. After playing around with little chairs, tables, and desks on a floor plan the workers starting building our “dream office”. In 7 months or so, they were complete!

You can see a few select photos of our new space from my co-worker Julian Dunn on his flickr page. Additionally what our old space looked like is also available on flickr.

Early Monday morning (01:00-05:00 ET Monday January 12, 2009) we will be taking the site off-line to perform some much needed maintenance on our storage device.

The CBC.ca website uses a lot of disk space. All of the media, news stories, podcasts, etc.. add up. We store all of this information on device produced by a company called BlueArc. All of the web and application servers “mount” the BlueArc to serve the website content. There is approx. 3 terabytes of data that is used for the website. 3 Terabytes is a lot of data, to put it in perspective:

1 Terabyte would be equal to 50,000 pages of printed material.
1 Terabyte of seconds would be 32,000 years.
850 Terabytes of storage is used for all of the pages in the Google search index
2,250,000,000 Terabytes of data in 1 gram of DNA

What will I see during the outage?
Because we need to take the BlueArc offline to perform the maintenance, all of the pages in CBC.ca will not be available. However, we are going to be providing an extremely limited site (what we’re referring internally as the “skinny site”). This site will be extremely light-weight and only offer the latest news.

A preview of the site during the maintenance.

All other content will be unavailable until the maintenance is complete.

If you have any specific questions on how the BlueArc works, or why we’re doing this maintenance, please feel free to post a comment.

According to the Google Zeitgeist published last week, ‘cbc’  is the number one term for news sources in Canada.

The results mean people typed in the term ‘cbc’ into the Google search engine more often than any other news provider – beating out CTV, BBC, CNN, Global and several others.

This would seem to indicate that the CBC is a strong front-of-mind brand for news searches, which bodes well for CBC News in general and cbc.ca in particular.

In part two of two of my “Federal Election” series we are going to talk about two items. The first, which is the brain child of David Raso, is the postal code/riding look up. For that, I’m going to hand the keyboard over to him:

My Ridings
Hi, I’m David Raso a Senior Architect of Front-end Development at CBC.ca and Blake asked me if I could explain how one of our Election modules work. We wanted to build a module which would show you information and results for the riding you live in, so the My Riding module was created. This module allows you to enter your postal code and then displays information about your riding – it’s on every page of the Canada Votes site.

No Database Needed!
Sounds simple enough right? The simplest solution would have been to hook up the form to some sort or dynamic backed code written in Java or PHP which would search though the postal code database we got from Statistics Canada and display your riding info. Well because we get so much traffic on election night we have to build everything to be extremely stable and scalable. So using a dynamic application was out of the question – so then how do you provide a postal code look up database without a database? We could use some cloud computing (like Amazon or Google) or big complicated Akamai cached edge applications – but we like to keep things simple.

Everyone in meetings would say: “It can’t be done”, then you sit and stare at the white board. Few minutes later we came up with one of those “It’s so crazy it just might work” ideas.

When you enter your postal code into the form and hit search – we don’t connect to a database and find that postal code – we change your postal code into a url and using AJAX (a JavaScript programing technique) we fetch a flat HTML file which contains the ID of your riding. We then use that ID and AJAX, again, to fetch a flat HTML of your riding info. This is all done by your browser so all our web servers have to do is return those tiny HTML files your and computer does all the heavy lifting.

How It Works
So if you enter M9A2X1 we change that into “http://www.cbc.ca/news/canadavotes/myriding/postalcodes/m/m9a/2×1.html” we then download that file using AJAX. The files contents are stored as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) which the My Riding JavaScript can easily understand and obtain the ID for your riding. Once we have your riding ID we then use AJAX again and download the file for your riding “http://www.cbc.ca/news/canadavotes/myriding/ridings/130.html” then all we have to do it display that HTML file in the My Riding module. Easy Peasy, Lemon Squeezie.

That’s all good and it works but you might be asking your self: “Does that mean you have a HTML file for each and every postal code in Canada?” – yup you’re correct. Over eight hundred thousand – 827,018 files to be exact. We took the database from Statistics Canada and created a script that would turn each postal code into a flat HTML file that contains the name and ID for the ridings in that postal code – some postal codes have multiple ridings, try out K0A1W0. We then uploaded the 3GB folder to our webservers – and because they don’t change we can cache all those files using Akamai.

On election night when the hundreds of thousands of users try to find their riding there is no database to go down, or application server to be bogged down. Just one small cached HTML file to download!

Comments and the Black Out
This is the first Election where commenting was allowed on CBC.ca. One of the issues we faced were users posting election related results in their comments.

This was an easy solution. We asked the 3rd party company that is responsible for moderating our comments (called ICUC) to not approve any comments for publication until the blackout period ended.

The latest federal elections introduced some new tools for site visitors to use on our site.

You were able to use your postal code to get riding information, view real time results on an interactive map, view live video, and talk politics by posting comments.

I will be talking about these applications in detail in the next few posts.

Blackout
Providing these features proved to be a challenge. The Elections Act doesn’t allow us to broadcast results to areas of the country where the polls haven’t yet closed. Therefore we were not publishing any results on the website until 10PM ET. This is known as the “blackout” period.

Flash Crowd
Because of the blackout wasn’t over until 10pm ET, that’s when the majority of users came to the site. Let’s take a look at the traffic graph for that particular evening.

The date/time in the graph is in Eastern Time. To give you an idea of the scale of the graph the top of the Y axis would be a value 3.8 times higher than at the bottom. The red arrow indicates the peak, which lasted for approx 10 minutes. As the evening progressed the traffic subsided.

“Elections Mode”
Because of the blackout we had to figure out a way to display results on the site the instant 10PM rolls around. Here’s how we did it:

All of the site assets were uploaded to the webservers hours in advance. We were able to control the display of these assets using Server Side Includes (SSIs).

SSIs allows us to hide or display certain html based on the existence of a variable by using if statements. Here’s an example:

<!–#if expr=”${electionsmode} = on”–>
<results related HTML goes here>
<!–#endif–>

We include a file called “vars.html” at the top of every page which defines the “electionsmode” variable. When it’s time to go live, we just change the “electionsmode” variable in vars.html from “off” to “on” and the new content appears instantly on the site.

Getting The Data
The elections results are delivered to us from another IT department. It is the exact same data feed that is used on-air. We process the results every 30 seconds and spit out XML data for our applications to use. The process works like this:

1. IT FTPs the raw election data results to our server.
2. CBC.ca’s Java application sucks in the raw data.
3. The application applies business rules, calculates percentages, then outputs XML files.
4. Process is repeated again in 30 seconds.

The XML files are used for the flash map and riding result pages. Because this process only happens every 30 seconds, you might see a delay from what you see on Television. This is because TV does not have this post-processing and transforming that we do.

The Flash Map
The flash map was developed by Tom Klepl, a very talented flash developer. He worked closely with the system administrators to ensure that the map was designed in such a way that it played well with our CDN (Akamai).

The map allows users to zoom in to their riding and see real time results of who is winning the race. As well, it gives a general overview of all the ridings in Canada. One of our interface engineers, David Raso, produced the following time lapse video of how the country voted on election night.

In Part Two
In my next post, we’ll go into further detail on how the postal code search works (hint: no php, java, or database required!) as well as how we dealt with users who would post election results in comments!

Sadly this is the last Olympics that CBC will be covering for a while. That said, this is also the most well covered Olympics in CBC history. Partly thanks to the Internet and cbc.ca.

Don’t Feed The Animals
cbc.ca/olympics provides you with up to 12 online “channels” where you can watch Olympic events live. This is possible thanks to the folks in Television (specifically Web Presentation group), encoding software by Digital Rapids called StreamZ, and Akamai.

The Olympic feeds are back hauled by Television to Toronto where they are encoded by the Digital Rapids boxes. They are encoded in Windows Media v8 at 500kbps. This stream is then sent to Akamai for distribution.

In most cases the video you see are raw feeds from the venues. This means that there is no commentary. The only audio you here is ambient sounds from the event.

A lot of people like these feeds as they provide coverage for their sport even if it is not available on television.

Canada Only, Please
Due to licensing restrictions by the IOC, only Canadians are able to view Olympic coverage provided by the CBC. As such, we’ve had to use technology from Akamai to ensure that we follow the rules.

The Akamai method of “geofencing” (as we call it) is more sophisticated than what I described earlier. Multiple methods are used, some of them are:

• Your IP Address. Using a database of known IP blocks and locations.
• Which Akamai DNS server you use. When you look up a host name (like www.cbc.ca) you hit a specific Akamai DNS server. Akamai knows which DNS server is in which country and uses that information to figure out what country you’re in.
  BGP Metrics. In a nutshell, Akamai looks at what other servers/routers you go through to get to the stream. If those are in the country Akamai thinks you’re in, then the confidence level goes up.
• Timezones. Using a piece of javascript on the client side. We figure out what timezone your clock is set to. If it matches with one of the timezones in the country Akamai thinks you’re in, confidence level goes up.
• We have people who watch you.

The methods listed above, plus a bunch of others combine to give a Country accuracy level of 99%.

Trends
Because of the twelve hour difference (in the Eastern Time Zone) quite a few of the events happen late at night and early the next morning.

The above graph shows the number of people watching the streams over the past seven days. The majority of the watching happens between 8pm and 12am EDT, and 6am and 12pm EDT.

Some days are more popular than others (like August 14, versus August 16). The little red arrow you see on August 19, at around 12pm EDT is when the most users were watching the streams ever.

I suspect that the closing ceremonies will generate the most streaming traffic during the Olympics.

Dube joined CBC in 2005 as Editorial Director for CBC.ca, responsible for overseeing editorial content and staff. Last year, he took on the role of integrating CBC News across all digital media platforms.

“Under his leadership, the site has more than doubled its traffic,” said Todd Spencer, executive director of news content for CBC News, “[Making it] the top rated Canadian news site in both unique visits and quality of news coverage.”

Since joining CBC’s online team, Dube launched commenting on all news and sports stories and the incorporation of user-generated content into the site, expanded the news site to include new sections on technology, consumer life, diversions, visitor feedback and revamped money and health sections. As a result, the amount of daily content published on the site has more than doubled, and the length of user visits has significantly increased.

At ABCNews.com, he will help steer strategic planning, business strategy, editorial content and production. He has also worked MSNBC.com.

New importance given to commenting and opinion sections. Comments have been flying in like crazy since they flipped the switch, and it seems readers are loving it.

Other important changes include:

Commented Tab
This tab at the top allows you to sort stories by most commented; if you have a penchant for reading comments, or want an accurate predictor of what the water cooler convo will be like tomorrow, this is a great option.

Recommended Tab
This tab sorts the stories by most recommended by readers.

Audio And Video Browser
There is now an audio and video browser at the top right of the page which allows viewers easy access to video and audio of stories, a handy step up from before when videos were just embedded randomly throughout the site. Now viewers can have a video running at the same time that they are scanning news from the rest of the site.

Your Voice
This section is now front and centre on the front page of the news site.

Reader Comments Featured on Right Sidebar/Your View
“Your View” is getting more play now as well with a big widget on the sidebar featuring scrollable reader comments.

Recommendation Icons
Icons are now embedded throughout and beside each story in order to make it easer for readers to recommend them.

Fresher Design
The overall design has been tweaked to make it a little fresher, a little crisper, and a little less busy.

What do you think of the changes?

]]> http://www.insidethecbc.com/cbcca-news-website-gets-even-more-interactive/feed/ 10 http://www.insidethecbc.com/radio-canada-website-blocked-in-china-again/ http://www.insidethecbc.com/radio-canada-website-blocked-in-china-again/#comments Fri, 09 May 2008 18:52:36 +0000 author http://www.insidethecbc.com/?p=1789 Easy come, easy go.

After all of the happy stories in the last little while about the CBC website being unblocked in China, a CBC employee was not amused to learn that the Radio-Canada site has now been blocked in China again.

Cedric Sam, an Internet Analyst for Radio-Canada, posted an article about this on his own blog in French. Here is a translated summary of the article:

“For six months, the website of Radio-Canada was blocked to internet users in Continental China. A week after Hubert Lacroix sent a letter to the Chinese Ambassador regarding this situation, the Chinese were allowed to view Radio-Canada.ca and CBC.ca.

“While on a trip in the Chinese province of Guangdong, I noticed that while in Shenzhen Radio-Canada.ca was not accessible. A “server not responding” message appeared when I tried to access both the portal site and the news site, while CBC.ca was accessible.

“Two friends in Beijing confirmed with me the next morning that the Radio-Canada website was not available there either.”