It was a fun weekend here in Lethbridge, largely thanks to several grass fires being spread by gale force winds.

One of the things that is bugging me incessantly in the wake of this fire is the scapegoating of “social media” for disseminating misinformation. I’m going to pick on Mike McCready’s article The Double Edged Sword of Social Media in particular here. He quotes fire chief Brian Cornforth as saying:

rumours ran rampant on sites such as Twitter about different fire locations and areas that were thought to be evacuated

Conflicting reports of evacuations seem to be at the heart of this whole controversy. My family and I did decide to vacate the neighbourhood, but not because of any reports we read on Twitter; On the contrary, everything I read on Twitter was encouraging us to stay put. It was neighbours, in person, knocking on each others’ doors and spreading word that the police were asking us to leave that prompted us to do so.

I have seen several comments on Twitter and heard first-hand from others that police encouraged them to evacuate. For the city and emergency services to insist that no evacuations were ordered seems a matter of semantics to me. More to the point, though, “social media” may have been the primary amplifier of this information, but it’s irresponsible scapegoating to blame social media for propagating rumours.

McCready suggests in his article that “To avoid the rumors that Cornforth indicated in the Herald article, it would have been smart to have an official representative of the city of [sic] fire department engaging in the conversation to correct rumors and provide information.” That’s all well and good, but when push comes to shove, I don’t care about the “official” word on Twitter, or even in traditional news media; If somebody is physically knocking on my door and telling me that we need to go because of that fire over the hill, I’m going to hit the road.

The fire chief went on to say:

We really count on the media to message the right information and keeping it accurate because there are a lot of things that get added out with the social media that are not necessarily factual.

The City of Lethbridge provided this update on Twitter at 9:01PM:

Reception Centre made ready ‘just in case’ for west Lethbridge residents (Soccer Centre) is now being closed as fire is contained

The local media who are being counted on to “message the right information and [keep] it accurate” were reporting two hours later that the reception centre at the Soccer Centre was still open. That’s right, folks, somehow Twitter was right and mainstream media was wrong. Misinformation wasn’t limited to just Twitter, but “social media” takes the blame.

My point in all of this is that communicating with other people is a double edged sword. Any time we interact with others there is going to be a risk of miscommunication or misinformation. I would suggest that miscommunication was at the root of this situation, and these newfangled social media web sites make a convenient centre of blame because they spread information much more quickly than traditional mediums with which officials are accustomed, and they are decentralized in a way where no individual ends up shouldering any blame.

I don’t mean to suggest that the premise of Mike McCready’s article is wrong. In fact, I would agree that the city and fire department would have been well served by providing information through engagement rather than using Twitter solely as a broadcast medium. The biggest problem as I see it, though, wasn’t a result of Twitter misinformation, but rather with inconsistencies between the officially released statements and what residents were being told in person; Such communication issues go well beyond the realm of social media.

The big news in the web and mobile world today is about Adobe’s decision to discontinue development of Flash for mobile devices. From Adobe’s announcement:

We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.

Marco Arment hits on exactly what I believe this means for the future of Flash:

If web developers must make non-Flash implementations of everything, why bother making the Flash versions at all? This isn’t just the death of mobile Flash: it’s a confirmation from Adobe that all Flash is on its way out.

Shawn Blanc:

After using my iPhone 4 every single day for nearly a year and a half, the glass on the front and the back was still in near-mint condition. The only physical blemishes to the glass were some minor nicks that were only noticeable when all fingerprints had been wiped off and you were holding the phone at just the proper angle.

This is pretty much identical to the experience I’ve had with my iPhone 4, although I have managed to get one noticeable scratch on the back of the phone. Like Shawn, I’ve never used a case or a screen protector, but I’ve also never dropped it from a significant height onto a hard surface.

On the topic of covers that I enjoy, I came across this U2 tribute album a few years ago and really like most of it. I’m in agreement with most reviewers as far as not being terribly fond of the Grits’ rendition of With or Without You, but even that one has grown on me a bit over time. One (Tait) and Gloria (Audio Adrenaline) are probably my favourites here.

Further to being good music, a portion of the proceeds of this album are contributed to World Vision to combat the AIDS crisis in Africa.

Get it from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com

I’m generally not a big fan of musical covers. There are notable exceptions, but in most cases I like the original version of the song better. I’ve recently discovered an entire album of exceptions: Relient K’s Is For Karaoke.

One Headlight and Africa are my favourites on here, but I’m really enjoying the entire album. If you know Relient K, you know how quirky and tongue-in-cheek their work can be (They did title an album The Anatomy of the Tongue In Cheek, after all). If you enjoy that, you’ll probably appreciate this album.

Get it now from iTunes (part 1 and part 2), Amazon.ca, or Amazon.com

I’m going to try a few new things around here. The first will be writing (Ha!), and the second will be using Octopress to build a generated static blog.

If you know me as a web guy, you know that I’m predominantly a Drupal developer, but I’ve recently become interested in the idea of using something more lightweight, like Jekyll, to host my own site. My personal site doesn’t require web-based editing, or user accounts, or most of the other features that Drupal provides. I already do all of my writing in Markdown-capable editors like Textmate and Elements, so the ability to keep my posts file-based and manage them in a Git repository rather than a MySQL database makes sense for me.

I tinkered a bit with Jekyll on Github Pages (very cool, by the way), but decided to go with Octopress (a framework built on Jekyll) because of its terrific HTML5 stock theme. I’ll probably start making tweaks to it before long, but when it looks this good, there’s no need to be in a huge rush.

Beyond that, there are a few reasons I liked the idea of a static blog:

• No database queries or PHP processing mean pages are served more quickly without any caching systems required.

• No web front-end means eliminating an entry-point for possible security intrusions.

• Scalability. You know, just in case I ever get Fireballed.

• Now my site looks just like Matt Gemmell’s site, and that’s got to be a good thing (Good for me, at least. I can’t say it’ll help his reputation much.).

HockeyJerseyConcepts.com has another fun series going on right now where readers are showing off their jersey collections. I participated in the favourite jerseys series back in the summer, and given that I have a bit of a jersey collection, I decided to do a write-up for this one as well.

The collection shown below doesn’t include a handful of team jerseys I’ve worn in-game and novelty jerseys that have snuck into my closet (such as a Guess Who jersey and the 2000 Canadian Summer Olympic podium jersey). Check out HockeyJerseyConcepts.com for more reader collections.

It was in middle school when I discovered my love of Eric Nicol’s satirical works thanks to a library copy of The Joy of Hockey. Since then I have been on the lookout for more of Eric Nicol’s books whenever I’ve entered a used book store, and I’ve managed to put together a moderate sampling of his works. Among the books I’ve added to my collection is Dickens of the Mounted, a series of letters written by Frank Dickens, son of Charles Dickens, as he served twelve years with the Northwest Mounted Police. The letters, of course, are concocted by Nicol, but with a great degree of historical accuracy; as a matter of fact, any details I’ve been able to find regarding the life of Frank Dickens were accurately portrayed in Dickens of the Mounted.

If waiting in line for three hours to buy a product on release day makes one a fan boy, then I guess I qualify now.

I’ve been using a first generation iPhone (quite happily, I might add) since bringing one back from south of the border nearly three years ago. That is easily the longest I’ve ever used a cell phone, and even though it is now three product revisions out-of-date, I don’t harbour the resentment towards it that I have towards previous devices I’ve owned. In that three years I’ve said time and again that it was the best phone I have ever owned, and given the current state of affairs, I wouldn’t consider anything but an iPhone. Friday was the launch of the iPhone 4 in Canada, and given that my phone is officially outmoded, I decided to upgrade to the latest and greatest.