Why does Google continue to suck so badly? Why are they market leaders in so many fields, yet consistently second-rate upon informed inspection?

Try this on for size:

Talk to us: GOOG-411 now available in Canada

[… W]e’ve recently expanded our GOOG-411 service to Canada. If you’re in Canada, you can now find business listings by dial[l]ing 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-4664-411) from any phone – for free….

At Google, we work hard to tailor products to specific markets and regions. We believe that accounting for the unique characteristics of each country can make the difference between an OK service and a great one. Although English is spoken in both the U.S. and Canada, there are enough differences between the way it’s spoken in the two countries that we engineered GOOG-411 especially for Canadian English. We incorporated some Canadianisms such as “eh,” “Traw-na,” “Cal-gry,” and, of course, “aboot.” We also took into account geographical differences. Whereas users in the U.S. are prompted for “city and state,” Canadians are asked for your “city and province.”

Americans think they can make fun of anybody. What if Google pulled this shit on the myriad Indians they’ve got working for them? That’s a lot of accent to mock.

Or how about the Russians? If Canadians aren’t very important to Google, Russians really aren’t.

What makes the posting quoted above an even greater abomination is the fact that one of its authors, Arnaud Sahuguet, is a French national.

This business of telltale Canadian pronunciations is an old canard that uneducated Americans think they can trot out anytime they want. There’s only one way Canadians use eh distinctively. Vowel deletion in Toronto and Calgary is consistent with North American English. (Do Americans pronounce every vowel in “New Orleans”?) I’ve heard a Canadian spontaneously utter the word “about” in the manner they suggest exactly once.

It’s a national stereotype, larded gratuitously inside a blog post that is supposed to be selling Canadians on a new service. Astonishing.

But what’s the kicker? Even that sales job doesn’t work. The Americans who put this malarkey together are too autistic and chauvinistic to have queried their own search engine to learn that Canada has provinces and territories.

It recognized Penetanguishene and Quispamsis, but not Iqaluit. (Nunavut does not exist.) How does it pronounce the name of the province between Alberta and Manitoba? “Saas katch a waan.” But is there a kicker redux? Indeed there is: The system doesn’t work with blocked phone numbers. Actual responses from this service:

• Say just the city and state, like “San Francisco, California.”
• What city and state?
• You can also type in the five-digit ZIP code.

We’re Google. Our shit is second-rate, but you’re the ones we’ll make fun of.

Or just hypocrites?

It was announced (on a page that refreshes itself continuously) that my esteemed colleague Simon Daniels will act as official liveblogger (perverse official orthograhy: “ ‘Live Blogger’ ”) at TypeCon in Buffalo.

Keen readers will recall that my liveblogging of ATypI Brighton – essentially the only coverage of the conference – resulted in pint-sized girls click-clacking right up to me (one of those times, invisibly from behind) to berate me to my face that “other people” were complaining about my typing in the various sessions. My response was to the effect that these complainers should talk to me directly (they never did), along with a reassurance that I would be doing nothing at all differently from that point. Later, the husband of one of the complainers gave me repeated Latinate dirty looks during a session.

The original complainers are the organizers of TypeCon.

Nobody liveblogs as well as I do. I’m not going to TypeCon, so I neatly avoid another set of confrontations. It would be charitable to assume that TypeCon realized, finally, that if an event isn’t liveblogged it simply will never have happened as far as the institutional memory of the Web is concerned. I am more persuaded by the explanation that they’re hypocrites.

Stuff White People Like is the best Weblog of the year – certainly better than that newspaper photo blog. It is a delightfully simple concept (so simple it invited jealous ridicule), a concept articulated in a consistent tone by a Canadian ginger with a mellifluous name, Christian Lander. He is now approximately $300,000 richer after signing a book contract. (If he quits his day job, does he lose his TN visa?) Perhaps unexpectedly, I had a highly indirect role in that contract.

Lander has, however, sullied his own reputation by holding a contest. You were invited to write your own 350-word Stuff White People Like entry. Join in the fun! It’s crowdsourcing – isn’t it? Perhaps not: “By submitting an entry, you are granting all rights to your submitted material to the operators of Stuff White People Like.” Here “all rights” includes the right to attribution.

In other words, you were invited to enter a contest in which an author may use your work for free with no limitations whatsoever. What do you get out of it? A copy of a book that would otherwise cost you no more than $11.20 at Amazon. Your writer’s fees, then, bottom out at 3.2¢ a word.

Stuff 675 white people liked: Copyright extortion.

(UPDATED)    Do you want to enter a contest to write a “hockey anthem” for CBC, possibly taking home 100 grand if you win?

What if you stood to lose much more than that?

What if you couldn’t possibly figure out how much you stood to lose unless you read and understood the fine print? If you’re a musician, how good are you at reading the fine print? Probably not very. (It’s OK – that’s why you’re good at music.) Let me tell you in nice clear terminology what CBC’s contest rules actually say. (I regularized spellings and capitalizations and, rarely, punctuation. If I’ve made any kind of substantive mistake, let me know.) [continue with: Hockey Rights in Canada →]

Lola was a Toronto art magazine that lived from about 1997 to 2003, when the editors shitcanned it. (That was widely reported at the time, but online mention of the magazine’s closure now seems to be limited to Ryan Bigge.) I actually loved the little scamp, despite its bad type; it reminded me somehow of Diseased Pariah News.

I came across a cache of old Lolas. What have they taught me, or, more accurately, what have they reminded me?

• The original OCA tabletop was supposed to be burnt orange.

• Later issues Peter Principled themselves into “full-length” feature articles, sometimes written by Gerald Hannon or Ryan Bigge or other established names – a delusion of grandeur at odds with the magazine’s ethos. If there’s one thing Toronto culture never needs, it’s another venue for Usual Suspects.

  Lola’s signature feature was its set of dozens of shotgun art reviews – 150 words max – sent in by whomever felt like writing one on any topic they considered art. And an artwork or an exhibition could have more than one review.

• Just going by the various photographs, clearly artfags need to go to the gym. I kind of hate artfags, actually (a tiny evolutionary step above Project Runway Canada maladaptives), so maybe I don’t care whether they go or not.

• Great piece on a Toronto Police forensic artist (“Cop Art,” Howard Akler, Spring 2003), whose entire job seems to be transforming a session of active listening with a relative of a crime victim into an accurate portrait of a person the artist had never met.

• Why, I totally forgot that R.M. Vaughan (of whom I’m a fan) had massacreed the public art in the new Sheppard subway.

  Robin Collyer’s “Dwell” exhibits the worst sort of create-and-run thinking…. “Dwell” is as ill-matched to its environment as it is potentially ill-making. No one in this car-centred neighbourhood is going to sit around Collyer’s ersatz Kumbaya circle and tell ghost stories, although they may have something ghastly happen to them, because the low-to-the-ground bronze sculpture sits directly in the line of pedestrian traffic, waiting to be tripped over. The sculpture is pleasant enough in itself… but its placement is foolhardy and negligent…. [Collyer] replied, rather peevishly, “Why does everything have to be safe?” […] Collyer drifted away in a huff as I watched another journalist pick a chip bag out from under the pointy logs.

  On the dullsville photos at Bessarion: “Bélanger cheerfully admitted that when she thinks of subways, she thinks of ‘people on the go.’ Well, that accounts for the first four seconds of her process.”

• Separately, Vaughan asks an art critic “Do you have a lot of art at home?” “Of course. Would you trust a skinny chef?”

• Something else I totally forgot: Just how much I loathed, to the very core, the pretentious advertisements for habitat (sic), “the brutally tough new postgrad new-media lab at the Canadian Film Centre.” (I cleaned up their punctuation.) Each of these bullshit advertisements featured a pretentious Film Centre grad with a bruise or a cut on their forehead or something equally nonsensical that is meant to evoke toughness. You couldn’t so much as defrag a hard drive, cupcake.

  I’ve been up to CFC and, after I tried to talk to these elite intellectuals about accessibility (you know, something that grads will be legally required to provide), I was referred to a certain person at the University of Toronto. I then responded that I’d known that person for ten years. Brutally tough? How about wall-to-wall Flash animation and a sense of self-importance?

• The Letters page is a bit of a bore, a relic from another century. A journalist writes a story, outraged letters flood in, followed up by dismissive responses from the original writer, who always gets the last word. Or not! Ian Carr-Harris: “Philip Monk has a wicked sense of black humour and his inspired remarks on OCAD are in character.” Monk: “I can imagine with what sense of baroque intrigue Ian Carr-Harris proposes his ‘light’ research project to me.” But wait – there’s a counter-response from Carr-Harris: “I believe it would be in OCAD’s interests for this to happen, and perhaps something other than baroque intrigue can be arranged that would surely include Philip.”

  Wake me up when these effete popinjays start to sound like people.

• Why am I not close personal friends with Alan Belcher? “If anyone can tell me a single decent thing about the Canadian art world, I’ll make art again. The art scene here is both rinkydink and poisonous…. ‘Peer’ assessment is false [and] corrupt and only exists to stroke correct politics and quotas. Basically I refuse to be a state artist in a Soviet system…. When I first moved back here, the weasels whispered I came home only to die of AIDS, as if that’s all Toronto’s good enough for. Let’s just say I’ll never forgive or forget.”

• Jennifer Matotek: “If I ever do something really evil to piss off the art gods… I know, after visiting Bruce Mau’s works at the Power Plant, that the art hell I’ll get sent to will prominently feature Bruce Mau whispering sweet nothings into my ears for the rest of eternity.”

• Issue 10 (Fall 2001) actually presages LOLCATS in its use of the word “Halp!” And every third issue seems to include a Mac OS 9– (“System 9–”) era screenshot.

• How did Ryan Bigge describe himself on various Contributors pages?

  • “Ryan Bigge is standing in the nine-items-or-less line”
  • “Ryan Bigge will not be undersold”
  • “Ryan Bigge is glad you asked”
  • “Ryan Bigge wrote A Very Lonely Planet and you can visit his egoshrine [provides URL] for more details
  • “ ‘I am Ryan Bigge,’ I said. To no one there. And no one heard at all. Not even the chair”

• Lola won my heart forever by publishing, in Issue 10, how much it cost them to make Issue 9 ($39,945.80) and how much it earned them ($39,945.80, including $6,020.87 from their $50K line of credit). Issue 9 sold 222 out of 600 printed copies.

What are its editrixen, Catherine Osborne and Sally McKay (also John Massier), doing now? I’m going to find out.

I suppose I could look up photographs, but then you’d get all Creative Commons on my ass. And I mean designers, provably and eternally a more heterosexualist field than developers (where Plasticbag queers the average).

• Mike Davidson: I say again, the straightest man in Web development
• Jason Santa Maria, a densely packed, deceptively short powerhouse with giant paws and a macabre streak
• Actual playboy Faruk
• Matt Brett, whose 905 rock/goth streak is not enough to prevent him from loving his cat
• Cameron Moll: Too nice to admit it; an ice-blond sculptural object hitched to a total bombshell

Honourable mention: Simon Collison, the acceptably artistic face of extreme heterosexualism. It’s the gentleness, the black hair and blue eyes, the relief at actually being addressed as Simon, the Icelandophilia.

You want the other list? It isn’t a list and it isn’t even a single name, it’s a single word. Hint: Also a ginger.

I believe I will have strip-mined this topic completely by the end of this posting.

Who were the “principals” at the bidding firms, and what, if anything, of interest did the bids say? Keep in mind that most of these companies acted like total greenhorns and lobbied to exempt the majority of their bids’ pages from disclosure, which I did not appeal. They got what they deserved, after all: They lost. But, really rather quite annoyingly, this means I don’t know the names of the so-called accessibility experts for every bid. In particular, I don’t know who went shopping in Ottawa. Presumably somebody. [continue with: Final data on TTC Web bidders →]

It’s fantastic, Ryan. (Cf. Holly Hunter in Broadcast News.)

Someday you’ll learn about the Internet. Surprise: It isn’t a magazine and it isn’t the Ideas section of the Star.

(NOW WITH CORRECT FIGURES)    I said I’d be posting TTC’s actual numerical evaluations of the bids submitted by Web shops as soon as I figured out how to comprehensibly present them.

Weeks of ruminating over it, with an imagined Linux open-source Randroid getting on my case for posting an Excel file (now a published file format, just like HTML or PDF), led me to give up. I spent those weeks trying to figure out a way of presenting a gigantic HTML table, something I’m usually good at, and again gave up. If you want the actual rankings, mail me and I’ll send you the file (Excel only whether you like it or not).

These are my computations based on TTC’s own criteria:

• Corporate qualifications/organizational capacity (15%)
• Staff qualifications (20%)
• Demonstrated effectiveness of previous Web-site redesign projects (15%)
• Proposed methodology (50%)

Perhaps foolishly, I did not note the results of TTC’s own computations. (Then again, I barely got all this into the computer before my time was up.)

Intrafinity NC had no score.