The ‘new media’ evolution according to a millennial photographer.

Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

I Support iPhones, Not Internet Explorer

Macworld
Over a year ago, I started telling my friends that, "I don't support PCs."

I had gotten really tired of being everyone's (free) tech support. The problems were always the same: My WiFi doesn't work! || How do I move to a new computer? || I have a virus! || etc…

That, and after going all mac for a few years, the PC interface just felt clunky to me. I really felt inefficient working on darn WinXP. So… I just told everyone to go get a Mac, then come to me if they ever had issues.

I went from doing 2-3 housecalls a week to one every six months.

Don't get me wrong – I love all my friends, but I've learned that in the drive to be a "nice guy," it's reasonable to set limits on what other folks can ask you. Without exception my friends would grumble, deal with my Mac evangelizing, and go ask someone else to fix their problem. There were no hard feelings (that I know of – I've had a beer with each of 'em :] and I'd guesstimate that 40% of them have now bought a Mac.

iPhone support

To the point of this post: this blog now supports iPhones. I finally got around to installing the wonderful WPtouch Wordpress Plugin, and I must say – it's rather snazzy.

In much the same way that I don't support PCs, I don't support Internet Explorer very well. But, to prove I'm an Apple fanboy, I do now support iPhones for the 6 of you who visited via iPhone in the last 30 days :]

Time Spent on Site vs. Browser and OS

Somethings make you think…

I don't know if this is because of my lack of IE support or some comment on the attention span of different browser users or an indication that the people who read this blog tend to not use IE, but a screen shot from Google Analytics on the right.

May 30, 2009 | personal | Comments

An Economist Approach to the Newspaper Industry

You should really hear my brother and me argue.

It sounds sounds a lot like we disagree on everything, but sit and listen to us, and you realize that we often have the same point of view, just different ways of expressing it.

My brother is the guy who got me inspired/angry enough to write You Can’t Make Abundancy Scarce. Phill Baker (who has no online profile to link to), who studies economics and engineering at UPenn and was assigned a massive project – to write a 80 page paper on an industry effected by technological change.

I’m pretty certain that his decision to write on the newspaper industry was in part to piss me off, but in reality, I’m glad he’s doing it. It’s interesting to see how an economist approaches the industry from a macro perspective.

He’s asked me to publish the paper when he’s done, mostly to see what the “industry insiders” think. I’ve agreed, so look for it in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, we're in the process of another email exchange, in which I play futurist and defend us blogging “ilk.”

What follows is excerpts from his email (small edits), interspaced with my responses. Any emphasis or links are my own.

Uh, yea, definitely, as to the last point you made. It's interesting b/c this is a 'classic' example of how success breeds failure under the pressure of technological change. There's some fascinating literature in that topic, but the poignant example is Kodak: they were so focused on being a film camera company, that they completely missed digital. They thought they were in the business of film (they were a pretty sophisticated chemical engineering company), whereas they should have seen themselves in the photography business.

Where we differ is the extent of the change. So the business model has lost its exclusivity and newspapers missed the boat. Now they're facing established competitors in their markets with serious competitive advantages and the benefits of network effects through first mover status (e.g. if the NYTimes had been craigslist, we wouldn't be hearing of the end of newspapers).

Newspapers are not going anywhere. Print will not disappear, there's simply too much demand. 15% profit margins (20% is a bit high, actually the industry average is about 17%), should disappear (they can be maintained at the cost of cutting everything in the paper, but that'd be stupid). Circulation will likely stabilize in the next few years as the cannibalization of the print edition by the internet edition faces diminishing returns.

What's fascinating is that their business model has been co-opted by search. I don't think, and the research backs me up here, that display advertising online will ever come close to replacing the lost advertising revenue that was enjoyed in print. The 'national' papers, or those that are big enough to scale and aren't trapped under burdens of debt due (some serendipity comes into play there), will likely find stability first as they can portray themselves as the replacements to the four TV networks. At the head of long tail, they'll be able to differentiate themselves from commodity news through designer websites, cool visualizations, (hopefully) good journalism and (hopefully) their brand names.

  • Agreed. Ads will very likely not be able to fund the entirety of a newsorg in the future. I can say this with maybe… 90% certainty.
  • Newspapers enjoyed a profit margin of 20% and higher.
  • The issue here is largely mindset. Newspapers are used to thinking of themselves as …newspapers. As they realize that they are really just a specialized subset of the tech sector, they'll come to have a revenue model that is more inline with the industry. Which is to say, one that relies on multiple sources of revenue.
  • We really agree on your last three points here. Newsorgs need a great UI, ability to inform using data, and to maintain a solid reputation.

Read the rest of this post →

Apr 28, 2009 | Battle, Media Industry | Comments

LINKS | Micropayments Don’t Work, but Everyone Has a Better Idea

Somehow, I missed the links from the latter part of last week, and have been bookmarking like crazy this last week. So, ya'll get a ton of links. Apologies for the long, long list, but I've broken it up with some good videos — and I've edited down! These are the cream of the crop from February 10th through February 20th:

Journalism Business Models

Web Journalism

Feb 21, 2009 | tumblr post | Comments

BATTLE | Google Juice Your Blog (Repost)

What is BATTLE?

I've challenged myself to battle the management at my school's newspaper The Daily Orange with a new 'new media' topic every week.

I've been doing this for a few weeks now, and have a bit of a backlog of posts on the subjects we've been talking about.

The following is a post that I just published at copress, that was originally intended for BATTLE. Expect to see more of these posts.

google-juice1

Bloggers are the anti-journalist.

Or at least that was the thinking at newspapers several years ago. Now that blogging has gained at least tacit acceptance among "true" journalists, newsrooms are encountering the very two same problems that have plagued bloggers since the dawn of... blogging: consistently producinggood content, and getting that content the exposure it deserves.

The good news, however, is that creating content comes relatively easy for journalists who are already used to having to meet a daily deadline. Once they accept the idea that a blog can be true journalism, they can adapt it as a less formal news article, a summary of their notes, sharing of a pitch that didn’t work out, a conversation with their readers, a series of relevant thoughts, or whatever gets ‘em blogging; most journalists seem to take to the new tool with gusto.

Read the rest of this post →

Feb 05, 2009 | Battle | Comments

Links for January 11th

These are my delicious links for January 11th from 08:06 to 22:57:

Jan 12, 2009 | tumblr post | Comments

You’ve Noticed the ‘Links’

If you've read this blog with any regularity, (or even if not) you might have noticed the obtrusive number of "These are my links for…" posts.

I recently stopped piping my tumblr posts to my twitter account so I've been looking for a solution. In the mean time, the best I can come up with is to have delicious auto-post links to this blog via postalicious.

Apologies for it not working or over-working, I'm still working out the kinks.

Your up:

  • If anyone has a good way to get tumblr to auto-post a digest to wordpress. That would be insanely useful.
  • How do you like the links living here as opposed to twitter?
  • Anyone know a good micro-brewery in the upstate New York area that isn't Saranac or Middle Ages?

Jan 09, 2009 | personal | Comments

Links for January 8th Through January 9th

These are my links for January 8th through January 9th:

Jan 09, 2009 | tumblr post | Comments

Links for January 6th

These are my links for January 6th from 00:38 to 02:52:

  • Blogging, a new journalistic genre ? | Monday Note - Pretty strong argument that blogs are a great new form of journalism.
    Problem: they don't make money. Adverts don't value them and they just don't generate the pageviews an article does.
  • What is literacy? BuzzMachine - If online journalism is expected to work, the audience must be able to do the following:
    Media literacy, then, must embrace all those activities and skills, not just reading but:
    * knowing how to focus on a need for information and express that by crafting a query to find an answer;
    * knowing how to judge the relevance and reliability of sources - including the PageRank-like skill of judging sources on sources;
    * knowing how to create (and remix) content across all media types;
    * knowing how to collaborate;
    * understanding the impact of facts on perspective and perspective on opinion;
    * understanding the impact of identity and anonymity;
    * understanding the relationship of pieces of information that make up a larger story via links;
    * understanding how to make and find corrections
  • On The Media: Transcript of "You Are What You Is" (November 28, 2008) - Jeff Jarvis makes a good case for convergence. The media is now a singular: no longer do jounos choose, video, print, photo, whatever. We're cross-medium.
  • Twelve months of top journalism blog posts in 2008 Christopher Wink - Title says it all. It's a pretty darn good list of the top posts of last year. Worth reading through the list at least.
  • HuffPo Worth $200M? Em, More Like $2M - Business news | Newser - Sounds like the $25 million dollar investment that HuffPo just got may have inflated the value of the blogging newspaper. Instead of the $100-$200 million the investment was based on, it might be worth closer to $2 million. Ouch.
  • Reflections of a Newsosaur: Newspaper share value fell $64B in '08 - A look at the stock prices and market cap. of the major newspapers in 2008.
  • The Turning Gate / TTG iPhone Portfolio - iphone friendly photo gallery direct from Lightroom: Cool!
  • Lee Enterprises: A poster child for the ownership crisis | yelvington.com - Steve Yelvington breaks down the economic crisis for newspapers:
    1. The internet means long term changes, newspapers weren't ready.
    2. Global economic crisis = less adverts = less income.
    3. Newspapers borrowed when the borrowing was good, and are in the same place as everyone else in this economic crisis. They debt they can't pay back.

Jan 06, 2009 | tumblr post | Comments

Aught 9

A happy aught 9 to ya'll. Several quick items:

  • Death Valley I'm obviously back from Death Valley. I'm through my first round out culling— 1000 pics down to 134. I'll get them up soon~ish.
  • Check out my most recent blog post at CoPress. It's a direct response to our first public criticism that took me too many hours on New Year's Eve to write.
  • Happy New Year!
  • I decided to stop auto-posting my Tumblr to my Twitter account last week. Today will be my first blog post covering the 'best of' posts.

Read the rest of this post →

Jan 01, 2009 | personal | Comments

‘Backpacker Responder’

10_Emigrant Wilderness

I've officially set gmail's 'vacation responder.' I'm off for a week of backpacking in Death Valley – the lowest altitude in North America!

It will be a much needed break from the internets. I've been dying for a backpacking trip for months now, and I can't recommend it enough to all of us who spend our lives living and dying by wifi access.

To celebrate I'm (finally) publishing part of my take from my last excursion on flickr – which I've now adopted as my means of publishing photos. Combined with the flickr export plugin for Lightroom, putting up photos immediately after a take is really easy, and the online interface rocks!

Fair warning: uploading through the plugin failed on me for the first time on this take. …Meh, I'll deal with it when I get back.

One other note: I've been working a lot (and officially taken over "Business Development") with CoPress recently. We're working very hard to see to it that college media has a future in this internet evolution. Please come check us out!

I'll end by saying this: I've been trying to check more and more items off my seemingly endless todo list, and finally got around to compiling this monstrosity. Try not to laugh at my poor sense of 'nifty' or hair too hard.


Newspaper Clippings Time Lapse from Joey Baker on Vimeo.

I've got a new year's resolution to get back to blogging more, so expect to see less of this stupid I-feel-obligatied-to-post-this-housekeeping-BS-just-to-have-something-up-there. And more real content.

I'm working on a piece that has the working title: "Print isn't dead, It's a luxury good."

Merry New Year's!

Dec 25, 2008 | personal | Comments

Business and Coolness

I've been super busy lately – I've started working at my school paper again. Even though it's a part time job, it's really a full time job. My new title is "exponent of the evolution." I will write more about that soon – there's a lot to say. For now I'll just leave it at: I do a lot of new media.

If you haven't seen it yet, check out Jeffrey Friedl’s Blog: Nikon D3 Shutter Release in Super Slow Motion. It's really well done, and very cool to watch.

More soon!

Sep 11, 2008 | personal | Comments

Welcome Adorama! | Joe McNally’s Blog

I had the opportunity to hear Joe McNally speak at Syracuse University (where I have one more year of enrollment, and his alma matter) near the end of 2007.

When I encounter something exciting I have a tendency to link it into my conversations for days. In part, to help wrap my mind around it, and in part to … be excited. Usually, this is some news article that I've read; perhaps a book; or even a funny tidbit from The Daily Show.

After listening to McNally, I talked about what him for weeks. Granted, part of this was because McNally's wife, Anne Cahill had brought the yet-to-be released D3 and D300 with the new glass, and we had all had the opportunity to play. It was also nifty to see how McNally worked, when, the following day, he demoed a lot of Nikon's wireless flash system to us. What I was bringing up the most though, was how McNally approached photography.

As an ostensibly successful photographer, he sure didn't present himself as such. Pro photography is a tough job, what little of being 'pro' I've been able to ascertain from being a student can vouch. Yet, I didn't become interested in photography to make money, and I'm not sure if it was attributable to his humbleness, but the McNally underplayed his true success – what he has experienced with a camera in his hands. Perhaps even more importantly, what he has enabled others to see what he experienced through that camera.

Today, McNally posted on his blog an intoxicating story about his 9/11 photography experience. Though he had mentioned parts of his adventure with the world's largest Polaroid camera at Syracuse, this blog post is touching, well written, beautifully illustrated (via photos of course), and well … go read it!

Jul 08, 2008 | Photography | Comments

Blogging Off an Car Battery

Normally, I would add a short article like this to my Tumblr feed with a few tags and move on. But this is a really important story about the importance of spreading the freedom of the press to third world. Furthermore it's a great example of how an educated (literate) populace needs a Fourth Estate to assure that the government remains in check.

I don't often go for human interest stories, but this is truly inspirational.

Meet Afghanistan's most fearless blogger

-Slate Magazine

Jul 03, 2008 | Journalism | Comments

I Know What I Want!

attn: John Nack

Photoshop-WTF-Adobe.png

Black Stroke!

Oh, and by the way, lest I forget: yes, we’re changing the default stroke color to black. Just thought you’d want to know.

-Photoshop Insider » It's Guest Blog Wednesday Featuring: Photoshop Senior Product Manager, John Nack

Thank god! That red stroke is just plain annoying.

(Yes, that is a forum topic about the stupid red stroke default on a site dedicated to people who typically complain about broadband speeds. That choice is clearly unpopular.)

The quote ends an article that is an interesting read if you're curious about the direction Photoshop is developing.

It's written by one of the top dogs in the Adobe world, John Nack (sorry couldn't find a wikipedia page), who has a blog of his own, which is interesting reading in its own right.

Nack's article argues that Photoshop developers know what users want better than themselves. He uses the classic example of the history palette and history brush coming out of the comparatively simple user request for multiple undos.

Adobe, what's wrong? You sick?

Yet, he also protests Adobe's finite set of resources,

Much to my eternal frustration (and probably yours), we’ll never have enough time to implement even 10% of the good ideas that come our way.

…and that his team puts in a lot of backend work which doesn't immediately benefit the average user.

These things take a while. (I’m reminded of the line, “It might look like I’m doing nothing, but at the cellular level, I’m really quite busy.”)

I'm perfectly willing to grant that Adobe can't hire every developer in the world. I also grant that backend coding is a lot of hard work. And, I certainly am not going to argue that, "what customers say they want and what they actually need often differ." (By the way Mr. Nack, that "cellular level" line is used to refer to lazy people who actually are doing nothing.)

Yet, Adobe should be leading the image editing development sphere, not slowly adopting it's technology. 64-bit apps are not a new thing, Apple's Aperture has had the ability to leverage the GPU from it's first launch, Carbon is on it's way out, and Photoshop is facing all sorts of problems because Adobe hasn't ported it over yet.

What happened to the desire to lead the way? Remember when the Healing Brush was introduced in Photoshop 7? That was an awesome new feature. It also came with the shiny new file browser.

...Which is where we start to get into trouble, the file browser was poorly implemented, and its successor, Bridge, is still slow. And, It's not like a file browser is a radical new idea. It's a pretty basic thing that Adobe has only managed to get right with Lightroom.

It seems like every creative I know is on a Mac or, like most people I know, switching to one. I can't remember the last time I even saw Photoshop on a Windows box. If you're spending so much time under the hood, why can't Photoshop CS4 be 64-bit on the Mac?

Some Cough Medicine

My complaint is this: Adobe, I don't care what resources aren't available to you. You're the top dog in this market by a long shot. If you don't have resources, get them. Not having competition seems to have made you lazy, and operating at the cellular level isn't enough.

Enough with the excuses, you've proven that you can produce a great 64-bit, Cocoa, app that intelligently employs Smart Layers, utilizes the GPU, has a fast file browser, and is capable of implementing user feedback. Lightroom.

Your ability to improve upon user feedback is important, keep that up. Yet, the following disturbs me a bit:

It’s interesting that faster performance didn’t rate higher on the list. [of top ten requests] On the one hand, I’d like to take this as a good sign that our work in CS3 to speed up Photoshop’s launch time, take advantage of multi-core systems, etc. has paid off & that people are happy. On the other, there’s no such thing as “too fast,” and quicker performance is the best possible feature: there’s nothing to learn. Therefore I think all the muscle we’re pouring into R&D to leverage graphics hardware acceleration & 64-bit computing will make folks happy.

Mr. Nack, I do indeed want Photoshop to be as fast as possible. It does need to go 64-bit, it should be able to use the GPU, it should be a Cocoa app. But I expect all of this to happen without a cost to the user. Adobe via Mr. Nack seems to be resistant to adopting all of these technologies.

I hesitate to say that Photoshop is 'fast enough,' but if you're creating a list of priorities, speed isn't in the top 10. Lightroom's technologies are (7 of the 10 features in the top 10 list). A real noise filter is.

Oh sure, I want speed. I want the 3.5 gig RAM limit removed (you need 64-bit for that), but these are all things that I expect from any company that is keeping pace with technology. I also expect that once you've developed technology for one application, it can appear across all of your apps. Don't sacrifice one expectation in the name of another. They both need to happen concurrently.

Go back to surprising us with cool new features. Stay ahead of the curve instead of slightly behind. We want more surprises like the Healing Brush. We don't want to be told why waiting to get what we want is a good thing.

Adobe, you're doing better now than you ever have before. Just because you have a virtual monopoly, you don't get to slack off. There are companies biting at your heels.

Things aren't that bad…

Sure, that top 10 list wasn't a scientific sampling. Yea, it was probably weighted down by non-profesional users of Photoshop. Still, it's sampling of the market, and Adobe attention is warranted.

Photoshop is still best in class software. I still prefer Lightroom for my photo workflow needs. Adobe's efforts with Flash are highly appreciated. InDesign is my goto app for all layout work. I'll even use Bridge in a pinch.

Adobe products are fantastic, but I'm discouraged. I feel like Adobe needs a Canon.

Update:

It seems that Adobe's Acrobat Reader 9, which has just hit the wild, is a good example of Adobe getting lazy.

Jul 02, 2008 | Creative, Photography, Reviews | Comments

Connecting Another Dot(s)

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has posted an article entitled Contecting the Dots of the Web Revolution. A quick summary of his points on how the internet has affected media creators:

  1. Shorter reads. People don't want to invest the time to read long articles online. Get the gist of what's going on, move on to something else.
  2. Old media needs to credit their online sources. Most major news outlets post their stories verbatim. Blogs link off to their sources.
  3. Traditional media is too attached to long form writing. New Media relies on links, and therefore, multiple sources to address a broad issue. Old media would write a book.

Its easy enough to agree with the first two points. It's the last point that is the interesting one.

The obvious flaw in the logic is that there are some stories that need to be addressed in a longer form. Karp specifically mentions books as an example of old media that is out-of-date.

It's not a problem for me to get behind the idea that New Media needs to adopt a short format style. But, the idea that books are going out of fashion doesn't sit right with me. Several points:

  • Books make the authors money. eg: Scott McClellan.
  • Books are still seen as a reputable academic resource.
  • Pick one:
  • That's because books are reviewed and their worth is determined.

    • Strike that one. This is possible to this online too. Wikipedia is a good example of it in action.
    The problem then, is that the internet is just not recognized yet as a legitimate source. That's happening, slowly, but it's got a ways to go yet.

  • Anyone can write anything online. Getting a book published means that the author has convinced the market that they has ideas that are worth paying for. This guarantees a minimum standard of quality that isn't yet achievable online.
  • There are some topics that do take the length of a book to address.
  • Applying Karp's point that people don't like to read long form online, it's reasonable that an alternative, books, are a better medium to present long form topics.

    • If you have read my post immediately before this one, in which I argue that the print newspaper is dead, it might seems as though I've contradicted myself.The question then, is where does this leave the newspaper industry, which I've said is not going to be able to rely on it's printed form much longer.

    In the same place.

    Newspapers are not long form writing. True, there are the occasional long articles. But, these will continue to work fine online. The occasional in-depth article is a good to see, but as a whole, the business of producing daily (hourly) news belongs online. The business of presenting long thesis belongs in book form.

    Jun 21, 2008 | Journalism | Comments

    In Civilization Again.

    I've been back in civilization for a couple of days now. I'm re-adjusting to life here in the USA – it is very different from the UK (you can wear shorts!). I've been reading a lot of the news that I missed while I was gone. Seems like nothing shocking happened, but there have been several good articles posted recently that got me thinking. I've get most of those posts written, I'll be publishing them shortly.

    I've got photos from my trip as well, I'll get them edited and posted in the near future.

    A couple of other notes:

    • I wrote a paper for a class comparing the freedom of press in the UK and the US. It actually is interesting to compare the two countries from a journalist's standpoint. I'll clean it up and post it online.
    • I've started to write a massive article on what I'm calling (for now) The Death of the Photojournalist. It's become a massive list of thoughts and research on the state of the industry today as it relates to new media. I have yet to decide what I'm going to do with this.
    • Putting "Nickleback" into Last.fm gives you a wider range of music than you might think.

    May 25, 2008 | personal | Comments

    Great Scots!!!

    I've just managed to update my portfolio(s) a bit. But… I'm off for two weeks of backpacking in Scotland (and no internet access). Photos on return!

    HINT: There will be no blog updates for a while.

    May 04, 2008 | Photography, personal | Comments

    Editing: ‘Real World’ Style

    My semester is coming to an end in London and I've just completed a video class that I really enjoyed. It was really my first experience playing with video equipment that ranks at the 'prosumer' level. Lessons learn'd a'plenty, but to the point of this post:

    A project that I did for this class was something of an experiment for me. I took footage of a few nights spent in my flat in London – which I share with 10 other people. We had joked for a while that we lived in a MTV Real World atmosphere. Reviewing the footage, I couldn't have summarized it better.

    No doubt we act and behave a lot like the characters in the Real World, but when I was editing the footage, I got a real sense of how MTV is able to edit their footage to do all the things that they are accused of doing – enhancing conflict, portraying characters in a certain light, changing the timeline, etc…

    And that's sort of the rub – reality TV is shot in a journalistic style. It appears to be capturing a slice of the lives of a cast of people. That, is the problem though – they are a cast, and it is a show – not a journalistic report. There is no greater moral oversight to how the show is shot and edited.

    I noticed that in editing, it was more fun to pick and choose clips, change the order of events (slightly) and so forth – it made my finished result more entertaining to watch. However, i certainly couldn't have presented it as a journalistic work.

    Apr 24, 2008 | Creative, Journalism, personal | Comments

    I Don’t Support PCs

    About a year ago, I read a blog post, (I wish I could remember who wrote it, I owe them a 'thank you') where the author wrote that he 'no longer supported PCs.' At the time, I thought this was amusing. The vast majority of people that I know own PCs. I've been the local tech support for as long as I can remember. Heck – I was the IT department at my middle school. I've been supporting and fixing people's PCs so much that its just expected that I can fix anything in real short order. (Sometimes I can, sometimes not.)

    Reading the post, I admired the author's undertaking, but didn't think it could ever apply to me. There were just too many people that I knew that owned PCs. I kind of liked helping them out.

    However, in the last 6 months a large number of people I know have been making the switch – to the point where I'm no longer the oddball out when I pull out my MacBook.

    So, about a month ago, I decided to start to tell people that I just don't support PCs anymore. If they need help, they're more than welcome to go see ___mutual friend here_____ and get help, I "don't support PCs." Of course, if they wanted to go buy a Mac, I'd be happy to help them with any questions they might have.

    I thought for a while that this would be a real turn-off for people. They might think that I was purposefully being unhelpful, or mean, or whatever. After all, it's not like I can't fix their issue, just that I won't. To my surprise, the reactions have been mostly: "Well, you're a bit of a Mac snob, but you're right, Macs are better. I'll go talk to ____ until I get a Mac."

    Moral of the story: Not supporting PCs has made my life much easier. I have less headaches, and people seem generally open to getting a Mac.

    Sidenote: Macs now hold a 6.5% market share – up from 4.4% where it's been hovering for years.

    Apr 17, 2008 | Tech, personal | Comments

    TIME.Com: Cheers

    In reviewing my previous posts in the last month or so, I've noticed that TIME.com has frequently been the starting point for many of my posts. I remember filling out a survey that TIME had on their website back in either October or November 2007 (thereabouts), which said that TIME was attempting to drastically change their online content – for the better. I faithfully filled out the survey which asked real questions like: rate the site's multimedia content, timeliness of content, and so on.

    Lo and behold, it appears that they've been good to their word. Content in the last couple of months has been fantastic. Multimedia has been very well done and timely.

    So, TIME – here's to a job well done. Good on you for following through.

    Apr 11, 2008 | Reviews | Comments

    Iranian Blogosphere Tests Government’s Limits – New York Times

    Like women who inch their head scarves back to see how much hair they can show or people who flout the ban on alcohol by drinking at home, bloggers seem to be testing just how far they can push. And, like Iran’s other rule breakers, some pay a price.

    Iranian Blogosphere Tests Government’s Limits - New York Times

    Blogging from Iran is … challenging. The Iranian judicial system is divided into two. The first is essentially a criminal court, they try things like murder or theft. The second is a religious court which can try … anything that is declared to be against the Islamic state of Iran.

    It's a dangerous place to test the limits.

    Apr 09, 2008 | General News | Comments

    Wow, That Took a While.

     

    So I finally decided to finish (mostly) my blog theme – let me just say that it took a really long time to get that nav bar up there. A really long time. I had to partially redo the way I do tabs on my main site, had to change a bunch of CSS both on my main site and here. All of which was made even harder because I don't have PHP installed on my laptop, so I had to update the live site to see if the darn thing worked. That, let me tell you, is a pain in the but when you're doing a lot of trial and error.

    The good news is that I've actually made things more efficient in the process. I cut out some unnecessary code, made my tab system better, and slimed down the size of the main logo that I use. I suppose I learned a thing or two about CSS in the process too.

    Thank god that's done.

    Oh yea, I know my 'buy' page is now really messed up as a result of my fiddling. I'll fix that shortly.

    Apr 02, 2008 | Creative, Web Design | Comments

    A Comment of Mine on Creative Bits

    Not that I share all the comments that I make in other forums/blogs, but I thought that this one was particularly timely as it sort of address something I've been thinking/dealing with a lot recently. Which is to say – marketing for the masses sucks. Find a niche, become the best there.

    see comment on Creative Bits

    Apr 01, 2008 | Creative | Comments

    Lightroom 1.4 – Sucks

    I've been holding off finalizing my Italy photos because of the problems with Lightroom 1.4, which of course I upgraded to the instant I got home from Italy. I've been waiting for them to release a fix, for over a week now to no avail. In re-reading the post, I discovered that uninstalling does not require me to delete all my preference files as I had originally thought. I will go a head and put LR 1.3.1 back on (there's not that much of an upgrade anyway), and finish those photos.

    ...erm but not tonight b/c I'm going to a football match: Brazil v. Sweeden. Should be a fun, wet, time.

    Mar 26, 2008 | Photography | Comments