Jason Bryant Blog

The viral nature of the internet never ceases to amaze me. Here are two examples that have impacted my life just this week.

First, I am an actor and voice over artist living in Canada. I also work in various capacities in the film industry. I have had speaking roles, and I have also done background and stand-in work. I was noticing on my Twitter feed a girl in Seattle added me to her friends list. So I decided to check out some of her friends. One in particular caught my eye. A fellow stand-in who works in L.A. The tweets cover all the things that happen on set during shooting. To say the least, I could relate. It was amazing to discover someone I’ve never even met, whose name I don’t even know, making comments about his job in real time. It was like we were co-workers shooting the shit about our jobs.

Another weird coincidence happened with TWIT or This Week In Tech. Toward the end of TWIT 99 they started talking about John C. Dvorak joining Podshow. Soon the guys started searching for TWIT on Podshow and got this. The results listed my show, jRock with Jason Bryant fifth from the top. This was likely because I had mentioned TWIT in previous episodes of my podcast show notes. What are the odds that at that particular moment, Patrick Norton would decide to read the results of that search and it would include my show? And that I would hear him do it? Actually I didn’t even notice it the first time around, a friend did and told me about it. Good thing, otherwise I never would have known.

I am in awe of the amazing power of the internet to connect all of us, instantly. Get ready for more of these funny coincidences as more and more of us start bogging, twittering, podcasting and flickring.

The CRTC decided this week to de-regulate some aspects of it’s broadcasting act. Don’t get too excited. Like many of their decisions, this is not going to help the consumer much, it’s designed to help the big broadcasters. They have decided to “remove restrictions on advertising time limits after gradually increasing the amount of advertising allowed”.

The regulator also set a deadline for Canadian broadcasters to switch to digital, August 31, 2011. The U.S. will be completely digital by February 17, 2009, so Canada will be over two years behind. But it’s better than no deadline at all.

I know broadcasters want to make more money, but with viewers doing everything in their power to avoid ads, are more of them really the answer? The CW network in the US has announced LESS commercials and more product placement in order to find a unique way of targeting their audience. The ads will also be shorter, 5 second “Cwickies” that will be sold in 15 second packages of three. So as the American advertising market develops into fewer interruptions with shorter breaks and more targeted advertising, we keep plowing ahead with the old-fashioned thirty second spot.

Advertising is annoying only if it’s completely irrelevant to your life. It’s why my finger can’t hit the fast forward button fast enough when ads for purple pills and feminine hygiene products come on. It’s not relevant to my life. But I will stop at an Apple ad, or maybe a cell phone ad. The solution is not to bombard viewers with more interruptions, but to add value to their experience in a creative way.

The Ad industry has to change. More of the same isn’t going to cut it anymore.

After switching to the Mac last year, one of the biggest problems I had was what to do about my documents and spreadsheets. I didn’t want to pay hundreds for Microsoft Office just to keep track of my expenses and income. So I first tried OpenOffice, which works great on Linux and Windows, but the Mac version leaves something to be desired. The fonts are all screwed up and it has to open up this X11 thing on Tiger. Very cumbersome.

So I switched to NeoOffice, and was initially pleased with the results because it runs natively on OSX and the fonts actually work. But very long start up times and crashes started to add up. The final straw was this week when we had a power outage (my computer is powered through a APC battery back-up so my Mac shut down properly), after which I was no longer able to open any of my documents or spreadsheets. I tried reinstalling several times, but no luck. A check of the Activity Monitor showed NeoOffice using 95% of both cores of the Mac. Not cool at all. So I decided to take the plunge and try Google Docs. I use Google for everything else, so why not this? I uploaded my most current docs and spreadsheets and within minutes I was up and running again. I Zapped NeoOffice and have not looked back. I was able to share a document with my roomate so he can instantly see what bills he owes me this month. I no longer have to email him the xls file. Very smooth.

Google Docs my not be the best solution for a big business that needs a rich client with tones of features, but for someone who needs some simple documents and spreadsheets, it’s the perfect solution. You can easily download copies of the files to your desktop in case that big Google Server in the sky decides to delete your account. It’s a great back up for all your information. I’ll let you know how it’s going as I continue to use it.