Tonight at 8:01 PM the One Million Acts of Green campaign passed the one million mark.

In just over a hundred days the campaign has attracted thousands and thousands of users from over 50 countries and over a million acts of green.

Now full disclosure, I work on this campaign, but I do think it represents another significant milestone for online campaigns at the CBC. This campaign lived on several different shows. The Hour had the lead but CBC News: Morning, Living, Steven and Chris and CBC Kids also contributed and no single show totally owned the initiative. It was a network initiative.

It also spanned across different platforms, there were many television and radio elements, but most of the action was on the internet – where people did the Acts of Green. That content was fed back to the programming units.

In effect the online activity drove some of the broadcast programming. The model was essentially the reverse of how we usually devote our resources – concentrating on television and radio broadcasts, and then re-purposing that content for the internet. In this campaign the online content became the broadcast content.

The campaign was also unique in that in relied on a social network to achieve a single goal – to get to One Million Acts of Green – as oppossed to dispersed activity in countless clusters that is the norm for social networking sites. And it worked.

Thanks to one great idea and the participation of thousands of Canadians.

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	Other Internet, The Media Landscape	Posted at 9:33 pm (03 Feb 2009)

Yesterday the CBC’s One Million Acts of Green campaign reached a major milestone, half a million Acts of Green.

The campaign is one of several innovative CBC campaigns being developed by the CBC in unison with corporate sponsors as advertisers become increasingly interested in non-traditional campaigns. The One Million Acts of Green campaign was developed as part of a partnership with Cisco.

Several other include the Campbell’s Chunky – Football Meets Food campaign, which won Paul Abrams, who works in marketing and sales, a Marketing Magazine Gold Medal Award for media innovation; as well as the Hockey Night Mashup and the Kraft Hockeyville competition.

Now in the interests of full disclosure I should mention that I work on the One Million Acts of Green campaign. The objective is to ask Canadians to commit one million environmental acts between now and July 2009. The campaign is well ahead schedule, having reached the half million mark in less than two months. It is one of the largest campaigns the CBC has ever done outside of hockey properties.

“What makes the non-traditional revenue so important is that the possibilities are endless and we are only held back by our imaginations and our ability to prove to advertisers that it will provide them an opportunity to be seen, in a place, or space, that their competitors are not,” Abrams said.

What do you think of these sorts of non-traditional campaigns?

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	Other Internet	Posted at 6:16 pm (09 Dec 2008)

Ken Gibson and Peggy Oldfield have put together a comprehensive online newsletter under the Employee Assistance Program for CBC staffers and retirees living in Vancouver and B.C.

The site offers memories from CBC archives, provides a home to the CBC 20 Year association, and helpful information on the EAP. The newsletters are composed quarterly, corresponding with each season, and are packed with CBC news and interesting tidbits.

It also provides the service “Where Are They Now?“, on which the authors post the current careers and whereabouts of past CBC B.C. colleagues. This is definitely a site worth subscribing to for any employee or alumni in the B.C. area.

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	B.C. Interior, Other Internet, Retro, Vancouver, Vancouver Island	Posted at 10:28 am (21 May 2008)

George Stroumboulopoulos has people stopping him to shake his hand in many American states because of The Hour’s popularity due to widespread viewing on YouTube.

The Canadian Press reports that The Hour has been getting millions of hits on YouTube since the show started uploading segments last fall. The Hour is also one of the top video podcasts in Canada on iTunes. Strombo says that the show has a wide appeal since it fills a gap in late-night TV; unlike other late-night shows, it isn’t pure comedy.

Viewers as far afield as New Zealand and Australia are also members of the shows’ Facebook group.

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	Other Internet, Personalities, The Hour with George S.	Posted at 1:54 pm (09 May 2008)

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.”

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	CBC.ca web site, Other Internet, Radio-Canada	Posted at 1:52 pm (09 May 2008)

In other news…

MSNBC.com has launched an suite of news tools dubbed NewsWare that includes the more pedestrian e-mail alerts, how to add MSNBC to your mobile device, and RSS feeds, but they also include some mindblowing applications that make reading the news much more recreational and interactive

Spectra Newsreader

The Spectra Newsreader allows you to choose your preferred news subjects. The stories pertaining to these subjects then swirl around the screen, eventually being pulled down to your menu. You can either read the story that is in front of you, or save it to your newsreader and go on to the next. You can also change the display properties of the tool to a more traditional ticker style rather than the swirling spiral that makes your screen look like a tornado of headlines. My only beef with this was that you couldn’t actually click on a story until it had been “pulled down” to the bottom – once they get that worked out this will be genius.

NewsScroller

This tool can be added to whatever social media you prefer – MySpace, Yahoo, your Google front page, and Facebook to name a few. Adding it to Facebook is a painless process, and the ticker is graphically attractive. The one glitch encountered was that if you customize the ticker to your favourite news subjects before you add it to Facebook, you’ll have to go back and do it again once you finally do add it.

Decision ’08 Leaderboard
This funky widget may also be added to your social media in the same style as the NewsScroller. Want an up-to-the-minute report on everything US election? Install this to ensure that you know down to the candidate how Hilary and Obama are doing. We imagine that this will be adapted and added to throughout the election process to make it more exciting.

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	Other Internet	Posted at 11:25 am (08 May 2008)

Web videos have tons of potential practical applications. Video blogs are becoming increasingly popular due to the ease of shooting and production. This recent video blog by Al Thompkins, as reposted by Dan Misener on his blog, shows how to make short videos on the cheap using a “Flip” camera, some simple editing software, and your own ingenuity. It isn’t as hard as you would think.

The Flip camera is a video camera with a “flip-out” USB port that allows you to plug it directly into your computer without a cable. It is available inexpensively, at a price point of around $200 as opposed to the expected $1200 for a digital video camera in the past.

This brings the realm of the video blog into everyone’s reach. Mr. Thompkins runs through the technology and software needed to work with a Mac; it is easily adaptable to a PC simply by just changing the software package to something like Podesk which is tailor-made to produce video blogs and video podcasts.

CBC shows have been taking advantage of this video format and have been posting their own short web videos; check out the following links to get the feel.

Spark – How To Make A Radio Show
The host of “Spark” and co-staff produced this how-to video.
http://www.danmisener.com/archives/334

R3TV (Radio 3 TV)
http://blip.tv/file/258335/
This contains some fun stuff, a music video, and interesting commentary in the manner of an internet video rather than a sleekly produced TV Show.

ZeD:
http://zed.cbc.ca/go?c=ZedCandidHomepage
While cancelled, the videos on this page try to keep the feel of an amateur internet video and give you the general idea of what is possible.

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	CBC Radio 3, How Shows Work, Other Internet, Podcasting, Production Gear	Posted at 1:45 pm (03 May 2008)

The CBC has re-launched its YouTube Channel.

Even though full-length shows are available, for the most part, on the CBC web site, the YouTube channel ensures that those searching for things like the Rick Mercer Report end up getting the videos from the source, not from some reposting hack.

The new YouTube channel incorporates lots of functionality allowing users to personalize their content. Users can favorite videos, subscribe to shows and share videos with their friends.

It’s all part of our evil plan to take over the Internet. Mwahahaha! Actually, truth be told, we probably decided to re-launch when that last bastion of stodginess, the Royal Family, launched their own channel on YouTube. Can’t hold out much longer after seeing that exciting content going live.

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	On-Demand TV, Other Internet	Posted at 1:50 pm (30 Apr 2008)

CBC Television will be putting more videos online on its YouTube channel, and will even be adding some full-length programs to the mix. Plans call for some of the popular episodic entertainment shows as well as more documentaries.

In related news, the CRTC this morning released its report on Canadian broadcasting, which includes a New Media category. It found that 70% of Canadian households now subscribe to the Internet (60% of which have high-speed access), and 22% of Canadians have listened to radio online.

A whopping 58% of Canadians used a cellphone to access the Internet, and 23% own a MP3 player of some kind.

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	Other Internet	Posted at 12:12 pm (01 Oct 2007)