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

Posts Tagged ‘Google’

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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Aug 03, 2009 | Media Industry | View Comments

UI Guesses for Google Chrome OS

Google's ChromeOS, might be vaporware, but the idea of a Google built OS is an interesting thought experiment in design. Knowing that Google is engineer friendly, have a business based on search, and a tendency toward minimalist design, leads me to the following guesses:

  • The paper paradigm is antiquated. Navigation will be dead, this will be a search driven OS. That means that they're gonna do something with the desktop, as in forget you had one. An analogy: If your current desktop is like the Yahoo homepage (cluttered, full of everything), a ChromeOS desktop will be like the Google homepage: a search bar.
  • Apps? What apps? You're not gonna be able to run photoshop on this. You don't need to. This isn't designed for people who need apps. It's designed for people that do email, web, and word. All of which can be done in the cloud.
  • You're not gonna see ads all over the place. Think Gmail ads, not google search ads. Small, inline.
  • Local storage won't matter – the goal here, is to store all you data in the cloud. Besides, this is gonna be for netbooks, what data do you have that can't be stored in the cloud? Think about the difference between the Palm Pilot and the iPhone. On a Palm, you had to sync all of your data to bring it with you. The iPhone can store it all (even your music) in the cloud. ChromeOS will operate the same way. I'd expect to see a 3G modem, similar to the Kindle, built into devices.

Finally, for all those calling it vaporware, I say this: Google has yet to disappoint. The Android OS had a similar lack of information too. I have faith! :)

Jul 27, 2009 | Creative | View Comments

Google Wave: The End of the Wild Web

There will be many – many – blog posts written on Google Wave, and there already have been so many created, that I’m sure this one will be lost in the void, but for whomever keeps ‘The Record,’ add me to it saying: “Google Wave will revolutionize communication.”

I’m throughly shocked by the number of naysayers out there. The reaction on Twitter after the announcement, and the excellent review of the event on TechCruch, was mixed. Some were just as enthusiastic as me, but many have the wait-and-see attitude that, to me, doesn’t recognize the pure awesomeness that is Google Wave. There are only two obstacles Google Wave has to overcome to become as widely used as Google Search that I can see: market penetration and standards adoption.

HTML5

The switch to Wave is going to rely on HTML5, a standard that has been 5 years in the making. That’s a really long time coming. The same year the standard got it’s start gave birth to Facebook, Gmail was still new, and IE was still 91% of the browser market. In Internet terms, HTML5 has been in progress since the middle ages.

Changing the basic language of the web is a drastic change, and we need to be sure that the standard is right. Yet, surely we can adapt to adding new standards at a quicker rate? Because all “modern” browsers are open-source, and have a track record for continuous innovation, it’s inconceivable to me that was couldn’t innovate on a faster scale.

Five years is an awful long time, and it’s incredible how much – of the draft spec – the browsers are already supporting. HTML5 will bring about a friendlier internet – one that feels like a desktop experience. We have the technology to deliver that – why wouldn’t we?

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May 31, 2009 | Media Industry, Web Design | View Comments

LINKS | Google’s Church

Since I've decided to start giving my links rankings, starting next week, I will only be posting links with a 3 star or greater ranking.

Lots of links on journalism this week (not unusual). There's a very long article from The New Republic that's very long, but exceedingly good. Also, check out my post on newspapers as a platform – I promise it's shorter. :)

Photography

J-School

  • Skills training is not enough for the digital journalist: A list of things that journos aren’t doing right in terms on thinking/training. It a topic that’s been overwritten on, but it’s very well thought out.
  • brightkite.com: Skills all J-Students need to know. A pic of a whiteboard from what I can only presume was a brainstorming session at News Innovation PDX
  • Journalism degree applications up 24%: Apparently, the number of jDegrees are up by 24% in the UK. Makes me wonder how US numbers compare. I suspect that most would guess that US numbers are down, but that never sounded right to me.

Journalism Business Models

  • A suggestion for The New York Times: Monetize your superior platform by sharing it with smaller news outletsA suggestion for The New York Times: Monetize your superior platform by sharing it with smaller news outlets:Interview at Times Open with Michael Veytsel, founder of a semantic-web startup he’s tentatively calling Factbox.Cast: Nieman Journalism Lab
  • 25 ideas: Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers: A really solid list for creating a successful online newsorg that is user-friendly and “open source”
  • Op-Ed Columnist - Start Up the Risk-Takers - NYTimes.com: Don’t bail out the failed businesses, use the money to start new ones.
  • Printed Matters Paywall madness: Dec. 2008 - Feb. 2009 A roundup of the paywall argument from the last few months.
  • Local Media in a Postmodern World, Part XCI, Advertising Loses Its Balance: A good look at the problems facing Mass marketing with the rise of the Internet. Basically: the web allows adverts to cut the middle man out of the picture, taking a lot of the wind out of Madison…

    “The online display advertising paradigm was pulled directly from the print industry, the group that originally designed the Web for media. Assumptions were made that
    simply don’t apply, because the Web is not a one-to-many, mass marketing medium. It’s a place where horizontal connectivity replaces the vertical, top-down model of communications. We weren’t aware of this in the early days of the Web (or at least the media and advertising businesses weren’t aware), so display advertising seemed a logical choice.”
    - Local Media in a Postmodern World, Part XCI, Advertising Loses Its Balance

  • The follow is a list of quotes from a very long, very in depth article in The New Republic on the state of the newspaper industry.

    “The other standard means of supporting the production of public goods is through private non-profit organization. In fact, non-profit support of journalism has recently been increasing. But much of the discussion about non-profit journalism has failed to recognize that it can mean at least three different things. The first, though not necessarily the most relevant, is the conversion of newspapers from commercial to non-profit status as a way of preserving their public-service role.
    …a second approach is philanthropic support of specific kinds of journalism, available through multiple outlets, whether they are commercial or non-profit. The best-known example of this solution is ProPublica.
    …a third use of non-profits—and it is for underwriting new models of journalism in the online environment. A good example of this approach is the Center for Independent Media.”
    -     Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)

“When a society requires public goods, the solution is often to use government to subsidize them or to produce them directly. But if we want a press that is independent of political control, we cannot have government sponsoring or bailing out specific papers.”
- Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)

“News distributed to the public is a public good in two respects. First, from a political standpoint, news contributes to a well-functioning society inasmuch as it enables the public to hold government and other institutions accountable for their performance. Second, news is a public good in the sense economists use that concept.”

- Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)

Journalism

Offbeat

Common, you know you wanna click on that picture to see where it leads.

Feb 27, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

The Internet Broke the Economy

 

I've noticed that I started to think that every blog post I write must be a fantastic piece of prose. Articles that don't meet the 600+ word count don't meet the cut.

Yea… I've been drinking too much of my own coolaid. Back to the shorter, more frequent posting for me. I suspect that it's more valuable in the long run.

 


 

Ofcom Website | Global Citizens and Consumers in the Internet Age

Douglas Rushkoff of NYU has completely blown my mind. It's not often that one finds a completely, world-upside-down, mind-altering … anything. But this is it.

The thesis: The internet has turned the world on it’s head because because it destroys the traditional definition of economy: “rational actors maximizing their value through the acquisition/distribution of scarce resources.”

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Feb 09, 2009 | Media Industry | View 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.

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Feb 05, 2009 | Battle | View Comments

Links for January 16th Through January 19th

These are my links for January 16th through January 19th:

Jan 19, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

Links for January 8th Through January 9th

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

Jan 09, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

‘New Media’ Chaos

I have too much going on in my life right now. I'm back at school and shooting a ton. Not only shooting, but I'm back to editing.

I have created/taken the position of "Exponent of the Evolution" at The Daily Orange, my student newspaper. I had previously served a year as the photo editor for the paper, and has sort of assumed that my time there was up.

Little did I know that the opportunity would arise to use a lot of the knowledge that I've linked to and talked about on this blog in the 'real world' (however real an independent daily college paper is).

As the Exponent of the Evolution, I have 3 areas of responsibility:

  1. Promotion and advocacy of 'new media' at the paper. Blogging, audio slideshows, video, podcasting, video podcasting, etc.
  2. Establishing and expanding the paper's online precense. This can be simple, like promoting the website in print, or publishing headlines on twitter, to more complicated things like the creation of a new CMS for college papers.
  3. Monetizing. I serve as an advisor to the business side of the paper for online ads. Best online ad practices, new revenue streams, etc

The good news is this: this job has never existed before, and it desperately has needed to. It is critical for the survival of newspapers in the internet age to adapt to the new, online world. At this point, no newspaper has done it successfully.

Papers like The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, have made leaps in the online realm, but none of them are able to sustain their operation entirely off revenue from the online side of the business. If print is dead, it is critical that newspapers, as the sole remaining journalists, figure out a revenue and distribution model that can maintain them.

Since this is already a bit of a disjointed, stream-of-consciousness post written at 6am out of pent up guilt for not writing a real post for so long. Let me provide a list of what I have done for the DO:

  • Twittering of all headlines @dailyorange. Our popular sports blog gets special designation for it's posts (as do videos).
  • Establishment of Final Cut Pro as our go-to video and audio slideshow editor. The result, as a movie, has a superior quality over soundslides or slideshowpro.
  • Our sports section has been publishing 'graphics' prior to games that give details on players, what to look forward to, who to watch, etc. We're trying to move this to an interactive, online, format.
  • I've developed a hypothesis: the lone reporter/photojournalist is dead. Instead, reporting will be done in teams that function like (pardon the analogy) terrorist cells. They will be largely autonomous, have a mission (a beat), and be comprised of a small group of people who have unique skills.
    TV media has been doing this for a long time – they always send out at least a camera man and a reporter.
    These teams will consist of 2-3 people (with an editor back in the office) who need to have 5 skills between them. Those skills are: 1) video 2) audio 3) photo 4) writing 5) 'personality. The last is a poor term for describing the person who is the 'on camera personality' – the person who is the front man for the team – recognizable to the public. These skills can be divided in any manner among the 2-3 members of the team.
    I've been working on this 'hypothesis' for months now, recognizing that in this new world it is impractical to expect a single reporter/photog to be able to deliver a complete multimedia piece. Non only is it impossible to shoot video, sound, and photos at the same time, but it cannot all be complied on deadline. Having a team of people working on the same project allows them to deliver a complete multimedia package for every story – on deadline.
    The point: I've decided to test the hypothesis: I have a 3 person team (who's beat has yet to be determined). At this point, they're producing a video a week on a chosen topic. We'll see where this goes.
  • Our sports section now has 2 video podcasts: On the Beat and Just Le Jus. Publishing 3 times a week, I'm hoping that this sort of thing will spread to other sections of the paper (working on Opinion).
  • I'm the front man for the DO at coPress, a collective of college newspapers who are developing an opensource, custom, content management system for college newspapers. I've written the first blog post of coPress here. This is a move to get our paper off College Publisher, and onto a more workable CMS – a critical goal for the long-term sustainability of our paper.
  • I've hired a couple of web developers (well, had hired, looks like I'm going to have to fight the board on this one) to help develop our CMS. This marks the first time the DO has hired someone specifically to develop code for our site. The sports graphics are a good example of the power that this brings.
  • We are now using vimeo for all of our videos. It's a flexible system that allows HD content hosting. We'll have our own branded player eventually, but for now, this is a great, turn-key solution.
  • Google ads don't make a ton of money, but they are something, and provide great filler for when we can't sell local ads.
  • In order to figure out who is visiting our site (and how), it's critical to have a good suite of analytics software. We're now using Google Analytics. 
  • Our sports section has been live blogging for about a year now from games. I'm trying to get this work ethic expanded to other sections.

I think that's the list for now. We're/I'm working on doing more. I was just approved as a full time hire, but I'm still doing the job of more than one person, and could really use additional staff to make this all work. I'll end by sharing a very rough audio slideshow I did for a local walk for cancer.


Light the Night from Daily Orange on Vimeo.

Sep 21, 2008 | Journalism, Media Industry | View Comments

Cloud Computing Is Well and Good, but It Can’t Beat the Desktop Computer. – By Paul Boutin – Slate Magazine

One of the nice things about Word and Photoshop is that once I fire them up and start working, I can forget all about the Internet for a few hours. Sometimes, my PC and I just want to be alone.

Cloud computing is well and good, but it can't beat the desktop computer. - By Paul Boutin - Slate Magazine

I couldn't agree more. The idea of putting all sorts of applications online is interesting, but not really practical. Photoshop Express is interesting, but it's no more than a proof of concept to me. Perhaps worth having as a tool on an online picture ordering site (like MPIX) as a means of last minute adjustments.

Similarly, gDocs, is convenient if I need to share text with someone as I type it (and see theirs), but it's really not a replacement to Apple Pages, which I do use instead of Microsoft Word.

This guy's basic point is good. Computing through the browser is an interesting idea, but yet to be practical.

The real money will be made when someone figures out how to use these simple apps as they are – not as desktop replacements, but as quick little apps that plugin into simple web apps. The web is about collaboration, make the web apps about that too.

 

Apr 03, 2008 | Creative, Photography, Tech, Web Design | View Comments

Google Outlines Proposal for ‘Wi-Fi on Steroids’ | Tech News Blog – CNET News.com

Awesome idea:

The company [Google], joined by other heavyweights like Microsoft and Dell, has long been lobbying for the Federal Communications Commission to free up unused broadcast TV channels known as "white spaces" for unlicensed use by personal devices. That portion of the TV band is highly prized because it can propagate long distances and through obstacles. 

Google outlines proposal for 'Wi-Fi on steroids' | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Mar 26, 2008 | Tech | View Comments

Simplicity


Back from Italy. Should be able to post more regularly now. Photos to come shortly.

Great comic/post on another blog that deals with Apple, Google, and your company.

Simplicity

One word: so true. 

Mar 15, 2008 | Creative, Tech | View Comments

How Google’s Counterculture Changes Everything | the Digital Home – Don Reisinger’s Take on the Tech Closest to Home – CNET Blogs

I don't intend to talk about a lot of negative things, but this one really struck my cord. First off: c|net blogs. Some are okay, some are bad, and some are awful. When these started several years ago, the idea was to have experts talk tech to a general audience. The problem is that blogs require 2 things: an opinion, and constant updating. That's a recipe for disaster. The link below should prove my point.

 How Google's counterculture changes everything | The Digital Home - Don Reisinger's take on the tech closest to home - CNET Blogs 

This guy's post not only has nothing to do with tech in the home, but it has no point. Maybe I'm completely missing his point here, but I hardly see how services that are meant to compete with other services are aimed at getting people to navigate away from a google page. He's either wrong or not making his point clearly. A example of why he shouldn't have to come up with new content all the time.

…which brings me to the second thing that's been pissing me off: all of the blogging/talk/whatever about Google. don't get me wrong – I do like me the Google. They're in my opinion, the best at what they do. But Mr. Digital Home, has no place praising them in a random, poorly worded blog post. It's just the latest example of how web culture works – talk about the hot thing just to increase hits (or some similar motivation, like having nothing better to write about).

Right. done. 

Mar 11, 2008 | Reviews, Tech | View Comments

Gmail Falls Prey to Spam Bots | Tech News Blog – CNET News.com

Gmail falls prey to spam bots | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

In a word… bummer. 

Mar 08, 2008 | Tech | View Comments