Category: Internet & Technology

“Aamer Haleem hosts a lively, fast paced, provocative and always entertaining array of conversation, debate and good old fashioned water cooler chat.

Informed and plugged-in guests bring insight and analysis on the big stories of the day and what they mean to you. And you’ll hear stories you won’t hear anywhere else that are guaranteed to get you talking and joining in the conversation.”

Last Thursday, the 29th of January, was when I was on this show. It was a neat experience to be in a radio station sound booth, wearing a set of headphones and talking into a microphone – I hadn’t done that since back in the Sound Doctrine days (the band I was in). What was a bit strange was that the host, Aamer Haleem, was in Vancouver – so I was alone in the sound booth. I was invited to be on the whole segment, which made me a part of the topic of the day…which happened to be “Should fighting be banned in the NHL?”. I tend to have an opinion on everything, but since I watch hockey essentially never, this was a bit of a stretch for me. I think I handled it well enough though. You can check out the full version of the interview over on the CBC site, complete with two songs, or you can listen to the edited down version that I created below.

CBC-thepoint-jason-dunn-unboxing.mp3

Another unboxing article was published this week, in a local paper called Metro Calgary. It’s one of those free papers that you’ll see outside grocery stores, transit stops, etc. The article was published in the paper on Thursday the 29th of January, and the same article was featured on their home page (pictured above). The photographer, Robin Kuniski, took a few photos like the above image – pretty standard stuff. But he brought an empty box with him and had a cool idea to put his camera in the bottom of the box and have me open it from the top – I saw a quite preview of the results and the photos looked great! Sadly, Metro Calgary ran with the above image instead, complete with me looking down creating a double chin. Gee, thanks Metro Calgary.

The article itself is kind of strange – it seems that the journalist that interviewed me, Jennifer Hilliker, didn’t really understand how YouTube works. The first line, “As Calgarian Jason Dunn unwrapped his Dell Studio Hybrid computer, about 90,000 Internet viewers watched in fascination”, makes it sound like YouTube is a real-time streaming video site. That Dell video has had nearly 90,000 views, yes, but when I opened the box the only one watching it was me. And check out this last paragraph:

“Ryan Felgate, blogger for techvibes.com said that people have to be careful, as he suspects some corporations launch “unboxing” videos under the guise of a regular person. “I’m not sure if a YouTube video could be an authentic depiction of a product,” Felgate said.”

Felgate makes it sound like none of the unboxing videos on YouTube are legitimate, which is ridiculous. I can’t imagine that’s what he really thinks, because the awkward quote isn’t even proper English – maybe he meant “I’m not sure if all YouTube videos are authentic depictions of a product”. I’ll drop him a line and ask for clarification, because it’s quite a broad condemnation of anyone that does unboxing videos – and I find it hard to believe that’s what he really meant.

I also couldn’t help but notice that Hilliker URL-dropped the Techvibes site, but not one of my sites, and I’m the topic of the article. I’m stunned at the lack of willingness to mention the name or URL of my site – I’ve dealt with more than half a dozen different journalists in the past three weeks, and thus far none of them have told any of their readers/viewers where they can actually find me online. More on that later.

The media coverage of my unboxing videos has continued over this past week, the latest being this article published over at The Weekly Albertan. And the words “Geek Porn” are in the title. Hooray. <sigh>

Last Friday afternoon the Alberta Bureau Chief for CTV News, Janet Dirks, came with a cameraman to shoot a story about the unboxing videos that I do. Here’s how it turned out…

The interview aired on Sunday night on the CTV National News, but I managed to bungle the recording settings and didn’t snag it. It aired again today at noon, so that’s the one I recorded. So how did I feel about this interview? All in all, quite good – especially since I was able to explain that the term “geek porn” is an inside geek joke. I appreciated the fact that the piece was well-researched; they even found one of the instances when I was genuinely shocked at what I found inside a box (the 1:15 mark). I think this should pretty much wrap up this media storm about unboxing videos – it’s been quite a ride! Ironically, I’ve been so focused on all this media coverage of my unboxing videos that I haven’t done an unboxing video in about three weeks. Time to get back to it!

I would have thought that the CBC was above cheap headlines, but it seems they like the were really fixated on the “geek porn” angle when writing this story. I now completely regret uttering the words “vaguely sensual” – I really should have known better. Referring to unboxings as “geek porn” is purely an inside geek joke, and I’m kicking myself for not being more forceful about that point. Oh well. 🙂

My CBC TV interview happened today, and it was an interesting experience. The whole thing lasted nearly two hours, all for a segment that will run 2 minutes. Not all of that was on-camera mind you – one of the things I helped the reporter with was to shoot two short promo pieces, shown below.

[Not sure what happened with my camera’s white balance above – the video below is much warmer in tone.]

[Note the incredulous tone in her voice – the angle of the story is that these unboxing videos are kind of strange and quirky, and who watches them anyway? I think I explain their purpose quite well…but we’ll see how it comes out post-edit.]

I filmed her doing the promos on my Canon HD camera, then edited them and uploaded them to YouTube (in private mode). Then she took her big expensive pro camera and filmed the video clips playing on my computer screen on the YouTube page. It should make for an interesting visual! I thought I’d share the two promo pieces here because I think it’s cool how she has that “news voice” – it makes me sound way cooler than I really am. Hah! The “one million views” she’s referring to is my total number of video views, as reported by TubeMogul. It’s a total number of all the video views across all the video sites that I upload to (about 12 of them). 99% of the views come from YouTube though.

The story will be shown on CBC Calgary, Monday the 19th, at 6pm – that’s channel six in Calgary. I haven’t seen how it turned out yet, so I’ll be watching it hoping that I didn’t come across as a complete idiot or shifty-eyed-home-office-dweller. I was nervous about it at first, but I eventually started to enjoy myself – the reporter was quite friendly and was very low-pressure. HP and Buzzcorps will be happy because the flashy geek gadget I used for most of the shots was the Vivienne Tam Edition HP Mini 1000 they sent a couple of weeks ago for Ashley to check out. Nothing like some free press for a product that’s going to be coming out in Canada soon, right?

OK, so that CBC radio interview I mentioned earlier? It seems that the radio interview was interesting enough to catch the attention of a CBC reporter, and she’s coming over tomorrow to interview me on camera and talk about my unboxing videos and what I do. It will be on TV on Monday, the same day as the radio interview – they want to do a “one-two punch”. Oh my. I’m already getting nervous about it – secretly I long to be a technology pundit, because most of the guys the mainstream media tap don’t know as much as they think they do, and I really enjoy sharing what I know with others – but I didn’t want to pursue that until I lost 30 pounds and looked like a healthy, ripped technology pundit. HAH! Damn, I knew I should have spent the first two weeks of January eating 100 calories a day. 😀

Once a year for the past four years, give or take, I’ve taken some photos of my home office workspace – mostly for my own amusement. It’s really neat for me to be able to look back on the way I’ve changed the technology and layout of my office over the years. I have some photos of my condo in 2001, and the technology I was using then, and it’s hilarious to look at. Big-ass CRT monitors everywhere! I took these photos for this thread over on Digital Home Thoughts – the timing was great because my office hasn’t been this clean or organized in months. I cleaned it up (with Ashley’s help) because a radio reporter for the Calgary Eyeopener, a CBC Radio One program, was coming over to interview me about unboxing videos. Yes, it’s radio, but I didn’t want to answer the question “Why is your office so disorganized?”. 😉

If you’ve ever been browsing a network drive and right-clicked on a folder and accidentally selected “Always Available Offline” (it’s easier to do than it sounds), you’ll have no doubt seen the little green Sync Center icon that comes up every time from that point forward – even when you’ve de-selected all the offline sync folders, and it has absolutely nothing to do, it still loads at every boot. The solution to stopping it isn’t found inside the Sync Center itself – where you’d think it would be – instead you have to go to the Control Panel and double-click on Offline Files. Once there you’ll see the above window, and it’s as simple as clicking on “Disable Offline Files” (in the image above, I’ve already done this) and rebooting. Voila – no more Offline File Sync Center.