This website had a 25-year-old woman's picture with the caption "Barbara Bush". -------- Update: they have now removed the picture, which it turns out was of Barbara P. Bush, 27-year-old daughter of W. This family seriously needs some new first names.
One of the best TransitCamp sessions was the wide-ranging Suggestions for Transit discussion. That link has a huge number of great suggestions. Here are my picks for getting the most bang for the buck:
Give Skytrain Stations Character Each station should have a unique character. Murals and artwork should cover all the walls where people wait and pass by. Each station should look different, visually appealing, and represent the style of the area around it. Granville & Burrard stations are indistinguishable currently.
Vancouver has an existing mural program that Translink should take advantage of for this. Skytrain stations right now are boring; there is room for drastic improvement here.
Give Skytrain Stations Activity Skytrain platforms are high traffic areas, but there aren't any services there. Translink needs to build little villages in these areas. Coffee shops, magazines shops, bakeries (ideally with personality - not just corporate feel).
Bakeries would be fabulous; imagine skytrain stations smelling like freshly baked bread! Make this a nice place to be, not merely a boring place to wait. Burrard station mid-level should have this pronto! Kiosks directly on some skytrain platform are also a great idea.
These things could be money makers for Translink, while improving the rider experience at the same time.
Load Buses Better Load buses from the back doors anytime there is a bottleneck at the front door. Faster loading speeds speeds up the system for everyone. Front-door only loading is like bad DRM that inconveniences everyone from a fear of a few. Translink is shooting themselves in the foot by introducing a bottleneck into the system at the front door of every bus, at every stop.
Improve Bus Stops The walls of bus shelters are being wasted right now. Put maps of the city here! And transit maps, and a nice 'You are here' dot. This would be a great boon for tourists and new users.
Open the Data There are lots of people who would love to build services using the route/timing data Translink has. So open up the data and let them! The core competency of Translink is not information technology; open-source it.
Make It Happen Translink That's the end of my list. I hope that Translink moves on these items. They could make a big difference to our transit service here. Props to the all the participants at Vancouver Transit Camp for bringing out these suggestions.
Translink has finally finished their official system to get upcoming bus times via text message. To use it:
- Send a text message to phone number 33333. - The text inside the message you send needs to be the 5 digit unique number for the bus stop you're at. You can find this number in the upper right hand corner of all bus stop signs (or look on the TransLink website). - They will text you back with upcoming bus numbers and times.
I tested this service out today and it worked for me. The reply text came back very fast too. Nice!
The government could enable some form of this here by giving taxis the ability to pick up multiple passengers. Taking it further, ad-hoc carpooling at transit hubs could eventually fill many of the empty seats in cars on the road.
Hot Grog is a new website I setup to quickly read the internets. It uses RSS to grab news headlines from various sources and dumps them out in a simple list.
There's a few different pages covering various topics. Web Buzz is a great page to see all the fun stuff as it happens across the internet.
ReviewMe is a new site that is trying to setup a marketplace where bloggers can offer to write honest reviews in exchange for money. The money comes from companies or individuals who want to get reviews. I think it's an interesting idea. Getting reviews can be tough sometimes, so having a straight up chance to buy an honest one can be a good deal. I'm testing out the system with Lux Delux, having just put in a review request for a blog that looked interesting.
ReviewMe is also spicing things up with an initial pool of $25,000 that they are paying out to bloggers to review the service itself. That's what this post is: a sponsored post from ReviewMe. I will apparently get payed $30 in exchange for this review of their system. The pay-out is dependent on each individual blog's traffic standings (as best as ReviewMe can estimate them at least). The only imposition on the review is that it must be at least 200 words long, and it has to state that it is sponsored.
I had a bit of trouble signing up initially, but once inside their system is pretty good. They got some good early buzz, and there's a variety of interesting blogs that have signed up in their system. I'm awaiting the results of buying my review before making further judgement.
Have a question? Put it in the email body and send it to q@askforcents.com (leaving the subject line blank) and you'll get an answer. Actually, you'll get at least 2 answers. And you'll usually get them in mere seconds. This forms the alpha testing of a service Ask For Cents, clearly meant to have a cost associated with it eventually.
I had a lot of fun asking random questions. About how the service works, tech questions, what the future holds, social policies, love tips, and more. The answers I got back ranged from funny to informative to literal to snooty to wrong. It's like a magic 8 ball, except you get a real human answer. Try it out now while it's free.
The service is run by Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk service. It allows computers to send work packets to humans to be filled in exchange for money. Pretty awesome idea IMHO. Answerers are currently making 3 cents per question, but inform me they are hoping for more valuable ones in the future.
Back at last year's IndieGamesCon I attended a good session on marketing from Kelly Heckman. In it she talked about building up a brand for your company, for your products, and for yourself as a person. The last item is what concerns me at the moment.
Having a weblog is an excellent way to build up your 'personal brand'. Unfortunately, I think that sillytech was hampering this somewhat. It's a group blog, and even though I have a page there to myself, it's not really mine. So I decided to start a personal blog that's all my own. Actually, I decided to take the sillytech code and create a personal skin that uses the same content database, but only shows my stuff. So nothing will change at sillytech, however I now also have a blog that's just for me. From now on I'm going to be spending my efforts building up Dustin Sacks' blog instead of sillytech.
The design is still a first version. I know I need a better picture of myself, and I want to put my blogroll up also. Any other comments you have on the design or layout or colors are appreciated.
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