byJoeyBaker

March 30 2010

Why I love MyNews from NewsTrust

I’m a news junkie. And I don’t do that Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, or Paris Hilton crap either. I only do the hard stuff – elections, Iranian nuclear weapons, health care reform.

If you’re my kind of junkie, then NewsTrust’s new MyNews is a must have. I’m pretty much in love with the webapp, so what follows is a mixture of praise, reasons to use, and suggestions.

Aggregators to the rescue

There are too many niche and mainstream news sites to follow. While we all have our favorites, but it’s just not feasible to check only a few sites that are either too niche, too sparsely updated to warrant checking constantly, or so full of frequently updated content that you’re sure to miss something important. The natural solution is an aggregator, of which there are really two different types: those that collect content from everywhere and attempt to show you the best stuff (think: Google News), and curated aggregators that look at a ton of hand picked sources – including other aggregators – and only show you the best of the best (think:

Memeorandum). The Google News variety of aggregator is great for diving deep into a particular topic. Put another way: they’re really good at search. However, they don’t do a good job of promoting the best stories and ensuring that nothing important gets past you. Curated aggregators pick up that slack, excelling at discovery and browsing. This is easy to see: Google News is great for research, but if you want to read the tech news of the day, you’re better off at Slashdot. Read the rest of this post →

March 23 2010

Microsoft Should Kill IE 6 Tonight: Why I disagree with Leo Laporte

Listen to This Week in Google #34. Cue to 37:00~ish.

On the most recent This Week in Google, Leo Laporte, in conversation with Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis (all 3 of whom I respect greatly) asserts that Microsoft cannot shut down their Internet Explorer 6 browser because businesses are too slow to adapt and the vast majority use Microsoft products. “It’s the price of success,” Leo asserts.That’s bullshit. It’s Microsuck’s monopolistic success that allows to announce that as of tonight, IE6 – hell let’s throw in IE 7 too – are no longer supported, and will not receive updates. A free update to IE8 is at this URL. (Or better: go for a browser that supports standards: Safari, FireFox, or Chrome)They can do that, even with most enterprise environments relying on them because they have every environment relying on them. Where else are their customers going to go!?I was shocked to find that both Gini Tripani who is a huge supporter of open source and Jeff Jarvis who coined the term “do what you do best,” let Leo get away with the statement. If Microsoft arbitrarily decided to do anything their customers would have no choice but to follow. That’s what comes from being a monopoly.

chart-of-the-day-revenue-vs-operating-profit-share-of-top-pc-vendors

PC vendor revenue.

James Surowiecki‘s latest piece in The New Yorker, Soft in the Middle, addresses this point: produce high end or low end products, the middle road is too mushy. Case in point: It’s better the be Apple than Dell and better to be H&M than Gap. The wide middle isn’t desirable or profitable.Microsoft, in its position of high, low, and middle of the market, should take a lesson from Apple. They should be opinionated, stop trying to please everyone, and make a few firm decisions that benefit us all – even if it’s a bit painful in the short-term. After all, it’s not like they have much of a reputation to defend.

*worth noting: I’m an Apple Fanboi

March 19 2010

Google Wave for Journalism, A #hackshackers Event

Google isn’t just thinking of Wave as another web app that it creates and you use on one site — it wants you to be able to use it across all sites on the web. Say, for example, you have a blog. As a post, you could share a wave with the public and allow others to see what you and the other people in your wave are doing. And these visitors to your blog could even join in as well right from your blog, and all the information would be placed right into the original wave.
—via Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web

Updated with a section re: workflow related to creating new waves and privacy one day after the original post.

Tonight I hit a few personal firsts. It was my first meetup, first time at the Googleplex, and first time getting a product demo of Google Wave from a live person.…because that’s all this meetup was. A product demo. Which was probably great for some of the room who had either not seen Wave before (very few people) or who didn’t grok the potential (a good many more) – but far less entertaining for those of us who lapped up the initial product demo and wanted specifics on how Wave is good for journalism.

Before I go any further – a sincere thank you to Google and the Google folks who were very gracious hosts. Providing a very comfortable meeting place, staying late to answer questions, let alone taking the time to talk with us at all is a step well above what most any other company is willing to do. It’s a brilliant feather in Google’s cap, and speaks well of their commitment to transparency and the Wave product.

There were a few questions asked by journalists about how to use Wave for journalism:

‘Can we have an off-the-record conversation so the Wave won’t be in the caught in the Google cache?’

‘What does a Wave journalistic workflow look like?’

These, and all other questions were answered with the well-rehearsed zeal of a PR team pitching their product.To be fair, Wave is in preview mode right now (apparently, preview comes before a beta), so anything and everything we see in Wave is considered broken and incomplete until told otherwise. Further, I completely appreciate the desire for Wave to be a clean-break from our traditional forms of communication, but the devotion that the Wave folks perpetuated for their product came off somewhere between arrogance and zealot-ness.

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February 23 2010

Objectivity: The Mortal Ethic that Started the ‘Quest for Innocence’

Couldn't resist this photo of Prof. Rosen. Seemed apt.

While newspapers, TV journalists, and news radio bemoan the internet as an attack on journalism, Jay Rosen’s excellent piece, The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism explores the failures of journalists themselves. In an attempt to cling to the standards of an obsoleted era, journalists, not the internet (read: those of us who use the internet) are failing as the Fourth Estate. The ‘quest of innocence,’ that stems from the need for objectivity seems to run counter to the mission of reporting facts. This leaves Prof. Rosen to end with a question: “How the hell could this happen?”There are of course, far too many reasons to answer the question succinctly, but let me posit a few observations in an attempt to respond:

The need to remain relevant

If “sources are going direct” then one of the roles of the traditional news institutions, to report fact, has become obsolete. To remain relevant, newsorgs are left with three possible methods of covering the news: a) present an opinion on events, b) cover parts of the story the sources themselves will not reveal, c) curate the sources into a digest. Traditional journalists feel the need to remain objective (more in a bit), which eliminates opinion and leaves only a combination of behind-the-scenes reporting and factual curation as a means of covering news. Since access is the easiest way to cover what the sources won’t self-reveal, newsorgs live in fear of angering any one party and cause them champion the shield of objectivity.

Objectivity means detachment

If the only way newsorgs can provide value is to gain access and curate, the desire to use the blanket of objectivity has never been so strong. Seemingly, only objectivity can persuade sources to provide access to a reporter. A strong reputation for only reporting facts … and who a fear of reporting any facts that might run counter to the source’s interest is always best. The ethical tenant of objectivity is perhaps the greatest hinderance to reporting ever conceived.

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August 3 2009

Dear US Senator for Silicon Valley, Please Help Fix the Mobile Phone Industry

Today, I received a response from my senator, Dianne Feinstein to a canned email form I had sent to her about mobile carrier practices. The following is her response and my reply.

Dear Mr. Baker:Thank you for writing to me about exclusivity agreements in the wireless market and your support for legislative reforms. As a wireless phone customer myself, I understand your concerns. I welcome this opportunity to respond.Although the market for wireless phone service has become increasingly competitive, some consumers have not seen the kind of efficient, reliable, and fair service that they want. Rather, according to the Better Business Bureau, wireless phone service has become the Nation’s most complained-about industry.I appreciate hearing your support for open access to wireless networks. I understand the frustration of purchasing a mobile phone that is locked and then not being able to use it with a different carrier. There have been multiple lawsuits filed by consumer advocates to prevent wireless carriers from locking their mobile phones, or at least to force carriers to find ways to guarantee interoperability of locked phones between networks.How the courts resolve these cases will impact what practices are allowed and whether legislative action is warranted. With our State’s large business sectors and diverse communities, any change in our telecommunications laws needs to take into consideration a variety of competing concerns since it will have far-reaching effects.Several states, including California, have enacted or are in the process of enacting laws to protect wireless phone subscribers. Nonetheless, federal legislation may become necessary so that all Americans are treated fairly. I believe that any workable solution for telecommunications reform should focus first and foremost on consumers and the public interest, while also balancing the needs of the network, service, and information providers.Please know that I will be sure to keep your thoughts in mind as the Senate works to address these issues in the 111th Congress.Once again, thank you for writing. If you have any further comments or concerns, please feel free to contact my Washington, D.C. staff at (202) 224-3841.Best regards.Sincerely yours,Dianne Feinstein

A Response

Senator Feinstein–Thank you for your response. I appreciate you giving some thought to this matter.It’s clear from your email that you’ve decided that wireless exclusivity is not an issue that deserves to make it into your portfolio. As the senator representing the Silicon Valley, and my representative, I must urge you to reconsider.Mobile carriers in this country have taken advantage of consumers for far too long. There are a long string of examples where legislation, not court cases are called for.

As covered in the New York Times last week, mobile carriers are making the us pay extra for simple services like voicemail. A bill to force carriers to allow users to set their own voicemail greetings, or one that forced them not to charge for listening to their service messages would go a long way toward controlling this out-of-control industry.
In most other countries, customers are only charged for outgoing calls – much the same way landlines have worked in this country. In the US however, we’re effectively double charged – for both outgoing and incoming calls. This practice, effectively allows mobile carriers to make twice as much off of each phone call. Legislation that enforced a “one charge per call” policy would go a long way toward straightening our backwards industry.
As you may have heard, the FCC has just began an investigation of AT&T for potentially unfair exclusivity arrangements with Apple to the exclusion of Google and other VOIP providers. The issue is one of Net Neutrality: can AT&T control what data is allowed over its network? Users pay for access to “unlimited” data rates over the AT&T network. For them to disallow certain types of data because it competes with another aspect of their business is not only anti-competitive, it’s censorship. I urge you to support the FCC in this investigation and take a strong stance on Net Neutrality.

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