A quick list of things that TickTick wasn't doing for me:

• Calendar sync doesn't work well. If an event changes, it is almost never reflected back in TickTick. This is a shame, because one of the initial draws on TickTick was an ability to see events and tasks in the same place.
• Everything is based on due dates. I actually rarely have due dates, but instead have dates when I should check in on something or should start work. Due dates are reserved for deadlines. TickTick has a concept of durations, but it's not a first class citizen in the way Things (or OmniFocus) treat start/defer dates.
• It would be nice to have more nesting. I have two big buckets of "work" and "personal", but there are many sub-buckets under that.
• I'd like to assign dates to projects, not just rely on the dates of the sub-tasks. Things is really good at this.
• TickTick keyboard shortcuts are very non-mac like, and many actions don't have keyboard shortcuts (e.g. "won't do" a task)
• In a ToDo app, I set dates all the time. The fact that I can't do this with a keyboard is a major slow down. The best option is to have smart date parsing.

I've tried OmniFocus in the past, but found it to be too complex for what I wanted. There were too many fiddly bits and I felt like the app was constantly trying to get me to focus on organizing the app not my life. So far, version 4 of OmniFocus doesn't have the feeling. This is in part because the interface is really customizable, in a powerful but simple manner. I'm still "moving in", but so far I think I have gotten it to feel like home.

There are a few things I'm missing from TickTick:

• TickTick respected MacOS/iOS focus filters. This was really nice, I do miss this in OmniFocus. Hopefully it's on the roadmap.
• TickTick has a highly flexible way of viewing projects either with Kanban or timeline views. I didn't use this a lot, but it was nice to have. Similarly, both Things and TickTick had a concept of "heading" in a project. I haven't yet seen this in OmniFocus, but maybe nested projects is the key?

To make the TickTick to OmniFocus migration simpler, I updated an open source script for 2023. I won't maintain it, but it should be simple to modify if you know a little JavaScript.

Instapaper has been integral for how I consume information since I first got an iPhone. The core concept is that as you're reading news, instead of reading each article, you save the article to Instapaper. This allows you to have separate "triage" and "reading" steps. It also has the benefits of:

1. Nicely formatting articles into a consistent format (which I find better helps me consume a lot of information)
2. Enabling offline reading. Very convenient for flights.
3. Text-to-speech gives me the poor-man's podcast version of the article.

Unfortunately, Instapaper went through several ownership changes, the pace of updates has slowed to just a few a year, and the article parsing has slowly gotten worse. The number of papercut problems finally got me looking for an alternative.

In doing this research, I was pleasantly surprised to find that there are many companies working on this problem and the feature set has expanded beyond what Instapaper offers. Tagging is now a common feature which means I can have one source of truth for my article archive. Text-to-speech quality has improved quite a bit as well. Some apps have built in RSS.

I haven't settled on a replacement yet, so this is where my research is today. These are the top 3 apps that I’m currently testing out:

Matter

• Looks the best
• Is the least complicated interface—this is good!
• Can import from Instapaper
• Is free, but for $60/year, it introduces:
  • Has an interesting ability to follow authors
  • High quality voices for text-to-speech
• The fact that it has a business model gives me some confidence it won’t die off
• It’s article parsing seems fine, but so far seems to be the least good of the apps I’m looking at

Overall: This is probably the right choice for you.

Reader

• $96 yearly, there’s a free trial, but you will need to pay. Again, I like that there’s a business model, but this is expensive.
• This is the most powerful app I’m testing. It’s got a lot of advanced features (e.g. using AI to summarize an article).
• It’s article parsing is probably the best
• It has a built-in RSS reader and can also receive email newsletters, making it a nearly one-stop home for both finding and reading
• The speech to text is decent, and there’s AI voices coming
• There’s a fully featured web app
• It can import from Instapaper and numerous other services
• This would be my recommendation, but its performance is awful. It can take over a minute to start up on my iPad. This is directly related to the fact that I have tens of thousands of articles in my archive, so if you have only a few articles and/or are willing to delete your archive, this likely wouldn’t be a problem. They claim they’re fixing this, but we’ll see. This has been fixed! Matter still feels more performant, but it's performance is completely acceptable.

Overall: Pricey, probably has a lot of features you won’t need. If they fix the performance, this will likely be my choice.

Omnivore

• Somewhat of a mix between the previous two in terms of simplicity of the interface and complexity offered
• No Instapaper import, but it can import from some other services
• Like Reader, it has RSS & email newsletter support
• The article parser is good.
• My attempt to import my large instapaper archive errored out.
• Text-to-speech is fine, and they’re working on AI voices
• Uniquely, it’s open source software. While I love open source, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for this app because it needs to rely on servers to parse the articles and sync between devices which means there’s an ongoing cost that someone needs to pay. They claim they will introduce a paid plan in the future.
• Has a very capable web app.

Overall: No business model yet, very geeky choice. Probably avoid for now.

Rejected

• Raindrop.io: only saves links, doesn't have offline storage or article parsing
• Pocket: I've used this in the past, but don't like the direction they're taking the product
• Obsidian: via the ReadItLater plugin, this do-everything app can kinda do the job, but it's not great.

While I enjoyed Duncan's story-telling, I was disappointed that he didn't compare the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic with today. The parallels are frequently apparent, but the narrative moves on without examining the implications.

What follows is a list of my quick thoughts after reading the book on these comparisons:

• When politics engender violence - especially when lead by a politician - the slippery slip is greased. Civilian leadership is responsible for running a society that limits violence. When politicians lead the population in internal violence, their moral authority is dissolved, and by extension, so is the state's. This leads to a downward spiral where the state doesn't have the moral authority to pull the population out of violence.
• Tying political positions to the gaining or maintaining wealth is inherently corrupt. Political agents should have the best interest of the people, the state, and the government in mind while at their post – in that order. If the primary motivation of the post is to extract as much wealth as possible, that inherit corruption sublimates the purpose of their office.
• A political system that distinguishes and divides many types of power to many posts works well. Beware when the power starts to consolidate.
• Laws that can be ignored or overturned depending on who is in power aren't trustworthy. The lack of trust leads to unrest for all sections of society.
• Political norms have the benefit of being flexible during a crisis, but equally easy to ignore when politicians are doing self-described 'great things'. Laws are less flexible, but are subject to easy change when their opposition is in power. The most difficult thing to ignore or change is popular unrest.
• It's easy to corrupt a vote by casting doubt on its legitimacy and it's easy to make the vote illegitimate. As soon as the vote is doubted, republican norms are ignorable, and authoritarianism is the only way to fix the mess. This is a chaotic cycle of unrest and authoritarianism that the Romans were unable to recover from.

Tech debt is any part of the technology a project uses that causes:

• slower development time because of increased complexity of adding features
• bad or ineffective product
• users, operations, sales, or developers to spend time manually fixing things the product should do
• maintenance cost of fixing bugs
• maintenance cost of upgrading legacy systems
• maintenance cost of not breaking legacy systems when adding new things (land mines)
• increased surface area makes the code harder to grok

How we (don't) think about Tech Debt

Modern software development is strongly influenced by Agile. There are many good aspects to Agile, but it's got it share of flaws. That full list is a separate debate :)

This ties back to Tech Debt with Khanban boards. Originally designed for factories, Khanban boards are a visualization of the flow of inventory through the factory. In the software profession, we've largely adopted that methodology under the theory that software can be built in a similar fashion.

The problem is this: factories take in inventory and output goods. Software takes in feature requests and outputs products, tech debt, and bugs. The latter 2 become future inputs. We don't have a factory's uni-directional flow. That makes Khanban like a 2D representation of a 3D reality, yet we still tend to think of a generic "backlog" when prioritizing tasks.

A Fourth Thing

There's a concept I've been struggling to name for a while, so bare with me:

There's actually an implicit category between new features and tech debt that we don't really have a good label for: inputs that are both. The best name I've come up with is "unrealized gains".

These are things that can provide new or better functionality and pay down tech debt at the same time. Re-writes are generally offered as solutions to these problems. They imply a double opportunity cost to not doing them: the ongoing interest cost of the tech debt and the lost chance to provide better functionality to users.

Existential Tensions

In addition to the tension of features vs. tech debt vs. unrealized gains, there's the meta tension of company/project viability. Meeting a code coverage threshold or architecting the perfect system doesn't matter if the company fails.

Startups (and projects) go through an arc that looks roughly like:

1. Is this a thing? (What if we put motor on a frame with 4 wheels? Could we get to Kansas in time for Christmas?)
2. Is it a big enough thing? Can this team do the thing? (It's working! But it sure would be nice to have seats, and maybe windows. Kansas here we come!)
3. Can this be a big business? (Kansas is pretty cool. But now they all want one of these car things for Christmas.)

At step 1, there's no time to slow down. You've got to figure out as quickly as possible if a motor can even power four wheels together. At the same time, make future-looking decisions: don't build your frame from matchsticks just because they're cheap. Metal is a better choice.

At step 2, you can't afford to slow down. If anything, things are harder now because we're building the car while it's moving. If you picked lightweight aluminum for your frame but realize that makes you too fragile in crashes, it's too late to change now. Keep going with what you've got and plan to improve on the next iteration.

If you make it to step 3, it's time to worry about scale. Re-visit fundamental decisions if you have to, but avoid re-writing. Iterate on small things and plan to release quickly.

When do we work on tech debt?

For a small startup, with just a few engineers, here are some useful questions to ask:

• Is it actually a "unrealized gain"? Prefer this over normal tech debt.
• If you don't have this, how will the development team be affected in 6 months? The customers? The company? Prefer things have a larger impact over a longer time scale.
• Same question but what if you solve the problem?
• What can go wrong by doing this task? How bad would that be? Balance great risk with great reward.
• How many people are affected by the second order effects?
• Can this task be broken into smaller tasks that are individually shippable? Prefer things you can validate early.
• If you don't do this, how many person-hours will it cost you each week? Prefer to save person-hours only if it's cheaper.
• If your thing is a 10% improvement that's good for companies in stage 3, but at stage 1, we're expecting things more on the order of 1000%. At stage 2 you can slow down to 500%.

Wix's react-native-navigation

Love: it's got native animations. Dislike the API, it's verbose and not react-y. This leads to a higher bug potential, and lack of debug-ability.

• ✅ maintained by Wix
• ✅ animation is done natively. This means it looks right.
• ✅ docs are pretty good
• ✅ Automatically switches to top nav on Android and tab bar on iOS. Badges are handled.
• ✅ has built-in support for a "light box"?
• ✅ has built-in support for a drawer
• ✅ has built-in support for modals
• ⚠️ Looks like it mucks with the way Android works quite a bit. There's a lot of native code to copy/paste. Not sure how this affects hot reloading.
• ⚠️ We're a bit constrained by the built-in components. This isn't necessarily a problem.
• ⚠️ Supports deep links, but there's an amount of boilerplate, and there's no enforcement that links are structured or unique. It's a bolt-on, not a primary concern.
• ❌ v2 is under actively development and will change the API. They've acknowledged that this will slow down maintenance on v1
• ❌ has native bits, an update here requires an app store update
• ❌ requires a central registry of screens
• ❌ state is maintained natively. This means redux time travel doesn't work. It might be possible to keep them in sync, but Wix isn't bullish on it.

react-navigation

• ✅ docs are pretty good
• ✅ Supported by Expo and Facebook. Seems to have wide community support.
• ✅ Will be the official solution … when it's stable. It's already blessed.
• ✅ also works on web
• ✅ stated "sensitivity" toward API changes.
• ✅ first class redux integration
• ⚠️ API has a lot of surface area
• ⚠️ Is of the opinion that URIs are not sufficient for native, but support seems to be just fine
• ⚠️ Not v1 yet, but the API has stabilized
• ⚠️ Animation is JS based. It shouldn't have any perf issues because it uses Animation to get to the native thread, but it's just trying to copy the native animations, which means there's an uncanny valley. After trying it out on iOS, it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. You have to really look to notice. Mostly, the left and right button transitions aren't right.
• ⚠️ Has a just a few native bits (deep linking). An update here requires an app store update.

react-router-navigation

• ✅ based on react-router (that we know and love), react-navigation (the community choice), and react-native-tab-view (a very robust tab switcher).
• ✅ might have native animations in the future
• ✅ API has everything as components. It's very react-y and small surface area.
• ✅ URIs are first-class citizens, deep linking is easy
• ✅ small wrapper around more developed and supported projects
• ⚠️ docs are minimal
• ❌ small community
• ❌ new project, not v1 yet

react-native-router-flux

• ✅ API is mostly just components
• ✅ has a decent community
• ✅ plays will with redux (obviously)
• ⚠️ "meh" docs
• ⚠️ is starting to be seen as old and crufty
• ❌ animations aren't great. They're in the uncanny valley.
• ❌ based on NavigationExperimental which is deprecated

AirBnB's native-navigation

• ✅ Integrates with redux
• ✅ decent doc site, but incomplete
• ✅ Native animations!
• ✅ Decent API, not the smallest, not the largest
• ❌ super new, pre v1
• ❌ not used in prod at AirBnB
• ❌ stated "not ready for prod"
• ❌ Development has stalled

Built-in NavigatorIOs

• ❌ Only works on iOS
• ❌ Not a react-y API
• ❌ On track to be deprecated

Built-in NavigationExperimental

• ❌ Deprecated

ReactRouter

• ✅ The ReactRouter we all know and love works on Native!
• ✅ Uses the v4 API which is just components, it's very react-y
• ✅ Good redux integration
• ✅ URIs are first class citizens, deep linking is easy
• ✅ Works on the web too
• ✅ Decent docs
• ❌ No animation support, unlike other solutions, this doesn't even try to animate
• ❌ No concept of modals or stacks. This is just a router

We’re too far away from AI becoming a reality to know what the concerns really are. The most extreme case is that AI is a new form of life. If that’s true, we have no conception over what an entirely different intelligence will mean.

It’s good that people are philosophizing over this, but with really artificial intelligence always 10 years away, it's all just speculation.

They should compete with Bloomberg, Google News, peer-reviewed science journals, CNN, and Pinterest.

Salesforce might want them (turns out they don't) to bolster their social credibility, which is a thing that Benioff (CEO) has been obsessed with this decade. They might get useful data around individual relationships, and help build a social graph to figure out valuable customers.

A Twitter acquisition can make sense if they do it right. Salesforce has proven (with Heroku) they can acquire non-core business and allow them to run independently enough while still giving Salesforce benefits. 

It wouldn’t be my first pick, but it’s not as bad as Microsoft.

"It’s really the coming together of the professional cloud and the professional network." In other words, we now work by toggling between our productivity software and our social networks. But why should the two be separate?

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO in the Wall Street Journal

This sounds like a reporter too impressed with a Microsoft PR flunky. I see no synergy, just an assumption that everyone who has a job uses MSFT products.

Microsoft is the same company (albeit with a slightly different management structure) as the one that messed up both MSN Messenger and Yammer (both 'networks' by the way). If they're viewing this as a way to get into CRM they'd have done better to echo the Microsoft of the 90's: use their limitless cash to ruthlessly release version after version until they finally get it right.

"This combination will make it possible for new experiences such as a LinkedIn newsfeed that serves up articles based on the project you are working on and Office suggesting an expert to connect with via LinkedIn to help with a task you're trying to complete," says Nadella. As these experiences get more intelligent and delightful, the LinkedIn and Office 365 engagement will grow. And in turn, new opportunities will be created for monetization through individual and organization subscriptions and targeted advertising."

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO in The Verge

With this strategy, Microsoft is offering to insert ads into your work applications. Users have been demanding the return of a helpful assistant like Clippy for years, and when powered by a social graph of ex-co-workers and recruiters, the possibilities are tantalizing.

Wait. The opposite of that.

Best case: Microsoft integrates LinkedIn into all it’s products, and LinkedIn becomes the defacto identity for the workplace. I give that about a 2% chance. More likely: LinkedIn will see no meaningful product development and will continue its steady decline. For Redmond’s sake, I hope I’m wrong, but this smells of a great exit for LinkedIn, and a shitty deal for Microsoft.

Post Aquisition

A savvy theory is that Microsoft just wanted a real Silicon Valley base. Reid Hoffman is part of the in crowd, and might feel he owes about $26 billion worth of help to Microsoft.

Naturally, all that's been announced is basically more advertising, and no new features for LinkedIn.

• Merge conflicts in node_modules suck. They're really hard to resolve.
• Merge diffs become useless. It's really hard to do a code review when there's tons of node_modules junk to look through
• The size of the repo is dramatically increased. This has many side effects. Switching between branches is slower. More importantly, it increases the amount of code you need to send between servers during your deploy process. This can really increase deploy times.
• Deploys are harder! You'll have to npm rebuild on every machine to make sure native modules are compiled correctly. This of course means that git diff on the server will be bloated.
• It's too easy to forget to save a module to package.json. That wouldn't be a problem for deploys because the module is in source control, but this breaks many npm commands like npm dedupe.
• It allows people to make one-off changes in node_modules. This is a huge pain when it comes to upgrading those modules. The better answer is to fix the upstream module (it's open source right?). Failing that, you can fork the module and use npm's namespacing to maintain your fork (hopefully just until upstream is fixed).

HBO has already been unbundled, and ESPN will likely follow suite soon. Apple may not get to a place of dominance in the home entertainment realm, but someone(s) will, and Apple is well positioned to be a player.

There's good evidence to suggest that VCs are succeeding in a marketing campaign. "Fintech" exploded in use on Google in 2015

The term is increasingly paired with what would normally be non-notable business partisanships:

JPMorgan announced a partnership with the small-business lending startup last week

…

“It's a great example of the power the city's fintech sector can have,” said Maria Gotsch, chief executive of the Partnership for New York City's investment arm. “Fintech” is the preferred term for startups that use innovative software to provide financial services.

The tech upstarts set to occupy Wall Street

And, banks are right to want to increase their technical chops. ACH is just one example of how far behind banks are on technology. A few years ago, big banks had better security than most governments and were leading the world in artificial-intelligence related fields. Now, they're behind and falling fast.

The pace of change will be slow enough that the traditional players can co-opt, whether it's through building, buying or partnering, and acquire the technology disruption.

Brian Foran, an Autonomous Research LLP partner

Perhaps true in the short-term, but go just slightly further out, and:

• The blockchain has the potential to reduce banks to simple miners. This would [dramatically simplify their business and require them to self-disrupt. Many good implementations allow the peer-to-peer exchange of money, circumventing banks.
• Companies like Wealthfront and Betterment show individual investors can get access to sophisticated algorithms and advice that used to be the domain of banks.
• Lending Club allows individuals to provide loans.

These are the three of the four services banks offer. Only complex derivatives (the type of financial products that have caused all economic recessions of the 100 years) are missing. Technology has yet to try to reinvent these, perhaps in part, because it dislikes complexity.

Long-term, history shows us that power tends to centralize. It's possible that banks are powerful enough to skip this medium-term phase of disruption by adopting new technology. Certainly the rapid rise of Bitcoin as a "blessed" technology is a promising sign.

At the very least, it sure seems like, "fintech" is a tacit acknowledgment by banks that they need help. That's both healthy and new.

Michael Daniel and Ed Felton,

As a software engineer, I'd like to echo the sentiments of nearly all others in my industry: "strong encryption", as the president called for, can not in anyway include a "backdoor", "frontdoor" or similarly named scheme. Anything that provides the government access to data necessarily creates a weakness in the system that can be exploited by bad actors. It directly makes the good guys less safe, and tells the bad guys which encryption algorithms not to use.

Frankly, the government has about as much place in this debate as private industry: none. Encryption belongs in the domains of open source and science where it can be tested, peer-reviewed, and provide public assurance to correctness.

Please remember: all modern encryption is based on one fundamental idea: "math is hard". This is an inherent weakness that we're only just barely staying ahead of by about a decade of computer advances. Given time, even the most powerful encryption is useless. On top of which, good encryption must be paired with a user's perpetual flawless use to be effective.

Put succinctly: encryption suffers enough challenges without facing and additional weakness imposed by a governmental third party.

I encourage you to read more knowledge authors on the topic:

• https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/many-things-wrong-anti-encryption-op-ed-new-york-times/
• https://theintercept.com/2015/09/15/fbi-keeps-telling-purely-theoretical-encryption-horror-stories/
• http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/24/nsa-director-just-admitted-that-government-copies-of-encryption-keys-are-a-security-risk/
• https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150903/17322932164/ftc-commissioner-says-public-needs-strong-encryption-not-backdoors.shtml
• https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151119/06213132859/paris-attacks-were-intelligence-community-failure-not-encryption-problem.shtml

–Joey Baker

Make error messages actionable

Error messages are usually an after-thought for developers and are usually very difficult to parse. Find common errors and give user-friendly output, with options on how to fix it.

Good thing I took CS255 when I was at Stanford, otherwise I might not have understood this browser error message! pic.twitter.com/EqtDWl6f3B

— Clara Shih (@clarashih) November 4, 2015

Help Others Get Started

Sometimes, setup is complicated. Improve the docs for people installing the project for the first time. Do it yourself and write down all the steps. Then start using the project and write down all the options. Save people time. Redux has great docs

How to be a 10x engineer: help ten other engineers be twice as good.

— Peter Seibel (@peterseibel) September 18, 2014

Make the Readme Awesome

If the setup docs are already awesome, make sure the rest of the readme is good too. A good readme should:

1. Have a simple one sentence summary. Homebrew: ":beer: The missing package manager for OS X." or jsonview: "A Firefox extension that helps you view JSON documents in the browser".
2. Show install instructions. There should be an step-by-step guide on how to install. This can be as simple as npm install express, or more complex for projects like Bud that might need to be compiled.
3. Provide a bare minimum example to use. Debug does a good job of this. It's as simple as providing a small snippet of code or command to run to get basic functionality out of your project.

Readmes are good, sites are better

Make a site for the project. gh-pages makes it easy to host a static site. The aptly-named gh-pages package makes it easier.

Sites are a good place to provide a logo and screen-shots of the project in use. You can even start with a pretty version of the readme.

Even better, give a way to try the project. Make a runnable example. If there isn't one, the project needs it. If there is one, is it easy to run? Is it easy to change options? Babel does an excellent job of this, but it's easy to setup any module with Tonic.

Add a license

If the project doesn't have a license of some kind, there are people (mostly at large corporations which have lawyers) who will not be to use the code! It can be a political debate to add a license to a project, but it's easy to do.

There are many options, but the MIT license is very popular. I prefer the Artistic License 2.0 which is a slight variant. Just copy and past the text of the license into a LICENSE file (no extension), and submit a pull request.

Add a changelog

Every project should have a changelog, but many don't. It's a bit tedious to go back through the commit history and create one, but most projects will welcome the change. Especially if you include a script to keep the changelog up-to-date in the future.

Help out on the issues

Look for an issue where someone is asking for help and see if you can reproduce the same problem. If you can, that's great! Post your error message. If you can't, that's great! Post your setup and say you can't reproduce.

In software design, these three remain: persistence, simplicity, and empathy.

But the greatest of these is empathy.

— meatcovered skeleton (@izs) November 17, 2013

Provide Alternatives

If you like the project, or if you don't, the docs could always use a section listing its alternatives and why this project is better/worse. (I've done this on my own projects.)

Why you might not need Redux if you use Rx: https://t.co/QnP5LsyTa7. We told you in the docs!

— Dan Abramov (@dan_abramov) November 5, 2015

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Here's what makes Silicon Valley unique:

• A culture of information sharing: good ideas are shared and talked about freely. Yes, there are NDAs and software patents, but startups (the new growth) focus on open source software and talking about new companies.
• Like-minded people in one place: most coffee shops in a 20 mile radius of Mountain View have somebody in them starting a company or talking to somebody about a new company. Geography matters.
• Funding: Starting in the 1950s with government money for Stanford projects, to the large number of angel investors we have now, SV just has a lot of money that is willing to take risks, with little long-term ramifications for failure.
• Reputations built on the present tense: Failure is completely acceptable – even expected – here. It's rare in other industries and places where your reputation follows you throughout your career.
• Meritocracy and oligarchy: at it's heart SV is meritocratic. Good ideas and good people quickly rise to the top. This counters the possibility of charlatans taking advantage of failures being largely ignored. Another counter is that there is there are king makers: Top VCs. They have the ability to blacklist bad actors – though this is rare.
• Pay it forward: There's a strong culture of one generation of successful entrepreneurs helping the next. This takes the form of both advice and money.

All of these build a "spiral of success", and make it far more complicated then just one city that has a high density of like-minded people.

The new management might matter, but I doubt it. I worked for them for a few months, and I was completely unimpressed. They're a top-heavy sales organization without much in the way of new engineering.

Pay attention to their marketing and you can see how often their execs keep shooting and missing. To go through the recent timeline:

• They were moving into the consumer space with Flipcam and Linksys.
• Then video was the big play with TelePresence. They've essentially lost to lighter-weight communications platforms like Slack.
• Now security is the focus. Their stack is close-source, ancient, requires years of training just to use, and has execs that don't understand what's involved. Security though obscurity isn't a strategy. As always, their primary strategy appears to be to acquiring other hardware companies and letting them die on the vine.

As an example how the execs are out-of-touch:

…when Clarke pressed about the risks of BGP, asked him to write the name on a piece of paper.

“I don’t think I have ever heard of that,” Clarke recounted the executive saying in his book, “but if you say there is a vulnerability with it that affects our routers, I will check up on it.”

…Clarke said that meeting had been with John Chambers, the longtime chief executive of Cisco

via

In the medium-term, they're not going anywhere. There's a common phrase in IT, "you never get fired for buying Cisco". I'm not sure that's going to be true much longer.

UI

React is really two things: a way to abstract DOM creation and a way of building UI that removes a lot of boilerplate.

Creating components

React can feel very old school sometimes, in a good way—First get server-side rendering working, much later add client JS as an optimization

via Mark Dalgleish

Because we have abstracted DOM creation, we have the server render out our HTML and then have JS take over when it's ready. This gives us:

1. Much faster initial load. Delivering HTML from the server is a lot faster than having to download a massive JS bundle first, parse it, download related data, parse that, then output DOM.
2. Progressive enhancement. This means we can work better in environments that do not support all the JS features we'd like, or have user interaction before the JS is done working. for this reason, it's critical that you use HTML as it's intended and deal with states that JS would normally handle. For example, it's important that we use <form> elements and actually give them an action attribute so they can submit data without the JS. Get <button> and <a> tags right. <a href="#"> is an anti-pattern. The client needs to have a router that matches what the server routes and it's important that the router works! [video intro to React Router]
3. Of course, server-side rendering also means we get accessibility. Google can now index us!

Lots of boilerplate can be removed, because React as a very succinct lifecycle.

Tutorials

React has some new terminology but it's pretty easy to understand. Here are 7 quick demos for making components. There are some best practices. I'd add that using this.state in a component is generally agreed to be a bad idea™. Pass in what you need with this.props, and store state in a global, immutable, object.

Here's a look at a sample app with flux and react for managing GitHub Issues.

Composition vs. Inheritance vs. Mixins

React keeps our practice of making components that do not fetch data and components that do. Think of it as smart vs dumb components

Keep in mind, inheritance and mixins are frowned on. Use composition for this purpose.

https:// via https://gist.github.com/sebmarkbage/ef0bf1f338a7182b6775
https:// enhance.js
import { Component } from "React";

export var Enhance = ComposedComponent => class extends Component {
  constructor() {
    this.state = { data: null }
  }
  componentDidMount() {
    this.setState({ data: 'Hello' })
  }
  render() {
    return <composedcomponent {...this.props}="" data="{this.state.data}">
  }
}

https:// HigherOrderComponent.js
import { Enhance } from "./Enhance"

class MyComponent {
  render() {
    if (!this.data) return Waiting...
    return {this.data}
  }
}

export default Enhance(MyComponent) https:// Enhanced component

Data

Even though React is just a view layer, it has a good answer for how to get data into the views with flux. Think of flux as a pattern not a library. You use flux instead of MVC, just as you might use socket.io in place of REST.

Flux for stupid people is a great intro. As is What the Flux.

I prefer flummox with immstruct.

import { Actions, Store, Flummox } from 'flummox'
import immstruct from 'immstruct'
import Immutable from 'immutable'

export class UserActions extends Actions {
  setEmail(content) {
    if (!content.email.includes('@')) throw new Error('must have valid email')
    return content https:// automatically dispatched
  }
}

export class UserStore extends Store {
  constructor(flux) {
    super()

    const userActions = flux.getActions('users')
    this.register(userActions.setEmail, this.setEmail)

    https:// a reference is like a cursor, but it always points to the freshest data
    this.state = flux.state.reference(['users'])
    https:// we're bypassing the setState method with immutable data, so trigger an update manually
    this.observer = this.state.observe(this.forceUpdate.bind(this))
  }

  setEmail(content) {
    this.state.cursor([content.id]).set('email', content.email)
  }

  https:// useful so that react views don't need to deal with immutable data
  get(id) {
    return this.state.cursor(id).toJSON()
  }

  https:// example of how to merge data
  set(id, attr, value) {
    if (typeof attr === 'string')
      this.state.cursor([id, attr]).update(() => value)
    else {
      this.state.cursor([id.id]).update((current) => current.mergeDeep(id))
    }
  }
}

export class Flux extends Flummox {
  constructor(initialData) {
    super()

    this.state = immstruct.withHistory('stores', initialData)
    this.createActions('users', UserActions)
    this.createStore('users', UserStore, this)
  }
}

No more MVC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i__969noyAM

The unidirectional data flow makes the idea of controllers obsolete. Stores are kinda like collections, but should be simpler – mostly because we should use immutable data. Flux actions and dispatchers replace the what models/collections do in a backbone app for fetching data. Talking to the server is not something that Flux builds in, but it's easy to reason out. Flux solves many problems that are common with client-side MVC. It simplifies dealing with:

• data that changes with time
• data that is cached locally, but can be changed by the server
• data that is relational
• data that has to be shown in multiple places in the UI

Immutability

Immutable data is a huge win for simplifying data access and storage. Combined with the fact that re-rendering the whole app in React is a very cheap operation, immutability means that we don't have to attach change listeners all over the place. We just have one change listener attached to the global immutable object and re-render the whole app on any change.

Here's a good intro to React and Immutability:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7IdS-PbEgI

Isomorphism

Here's how Yahoo solved the problem of getting data to React views on both the server and the client. Really, the whole problem is easy with flux implementation like flummox and react-router.

import Router from 'react-router'
import React from 'react'
import routes from './react-router-routes.jsx'

function serveHTML(req, res) {
  ReactRouter.run(routes, req.url, (Handler) =>
    React.renderToString(React.createElement(Handler, data)),
  )
}

Relay and the Future

Relay isn't open source yet, but it's a really exciting and new way of fetching data from views. Here's a first look at what Relay will do, and here's an updated walk through.

React-awesome

A massive list of anything I might have missed

As a fan of CSS (as completely flawed as it is), I was skeptical from the start, and I'm now sure that React's approach is not ready. At a minimum it's not ready. More likely, it's fundamentally flawed. It’s no good at vendor prefixes, abstraction, media/element queries nor performance.

I will say, once you get used to JSX, it's actually really nice be able to write styles in the same file. It feels like a real "component". But, there are far to many restrictions to make this practical.

No Style Fallbacks

There's no way to override a style on the same selector. This is impossible to do:

div {
  display: -webkit-flex;
  display: flex;
}

Because you can't declare two display styles. That makes flexbox impossible because iOS needs the webkit prefix. My workaround is to add a .flex class to the global CSS and apply that classname in React, but that's a kludge, and gets away from "component" feel of React.

If you use babel (and you should), babel-plugin-react-autoprefix might be a good answer.

No Media Queries or Element Queries

Media queries are broken. You have to use JS to detect widths and update inline styles accordingly. I was initially excited by this, because it means that element queries could be the default! But, if you go down that route, you'll have to use .offsetWidth and window.resize all over the place. That's crap for performance. All the global resize event listeners will slow you down, and offsetWidth is a good way to cause a recalc-style.

If you opt for faux media queries (which is unfortunate because element queries are more component-style), then you need to use something like matchmedia (polyfill). This is a bit slower than the native code the browser can use to do these same calculations… but it's close enough, so at least performance isn't much affected.

No matter which approach you choose, if you render on the server (you should), you have no way of finding the window/element size. This means, the initial state you ship down to the client has a very good chance of being wrong. You've lost a lot of the benefit of server-side rendering – your users are likely to experience a Flash of Incorrectly Styled Content (FISC). That's a major gotcha. With CSS, we're ensured that the stylesheets download before the HTML, so we never see this problem.

There's Jed Watson has an interesting proposal extract inline styles into a style sheet when rendered on the server. This could work for some basic styles, but still doesn't address the problem of media queries.

On top of which, the flexibility that inline-styles gives you as a trade-of for the lack of features built into CSS, comes with some subtle security gotchas.

No Cascading Styles

Avoiding inline styles is crucial. Inline styles are really hard to override, leading to a lot of unnecessary !important rule-sprinkling. Most of the time, a CSS class will do a better job at grouping a set of styles together, making it easier for the developer to identify what the styles are trying to accomplish, change the component stylistically, and generally have more control over the styles of the component. Not every inline style can be avoided. Positioning styles, such as left top right and bottom, that frequently change over time have a place inline. Coincidentally, the developer is expected not to have a need for modifying these styles, where control is deferred to the library author to do as they intended.

Nicolas Bevacqua, Designing Front-End Components

The whole point of inline-styles is to prevent global styles – but sometimes, global styles are good. One of the first things I wanted to do was use normalize.css. There's no way to that, you have to have a stylesheet. Things would be different if you could tie a stylesheet to a component. For example, you could have a component that only styles headings called type. Then each time you use a heading, you require that type component, and your <h1> just looks right.

Re-usable animations with @keyframes are out too. That's a bummer because CSS-based animations are a lot easier to make performant than JavaScript based animations. Even simple things like :hover have to be managed in JS with inline styles. Projects like Radium ease the pain of writing this code, but don't solve the inherent performance problems.

Further, debugging in devtools is a pain. Inline-styles make it impossible to see changes made to one component affect all other similar components.

Of course, there's also the problem of re-usability. One of the greatest features (and pain points) of CSS is that styles can be overridden with specificity or order. Inline styles have the highest specificity and are last in the order priority. Without a way to override styles, it's much harder to build generic components like button or a.

Performance

After all this, you're still stuck with the fundamental flaws that are inline styles: additional initial download times because of all the additional markup, and the ongoing performance hit as the the browser needs to parse all the style tags instead of a single CSS rule. Inline styles are slower than a stylesheet, loading CSS files in the <head> can be parallelized, and don't necessitate downloading duplicate markup for (potentially many) similarly styled elements.

Granted, all CSS performance is unlikely to be a large bottleneck. But this is a fundamental flaw of inline styles. It might be worth the trade-off but combined with the other limitations, I'm not sold.

What Could Work

More markup and moving calculations from heavily optimized browser-internals to JavaScript is net performance loss. Without @keyframes animations gets a lot harder. Without global styles we loose out on the cascading nature of CSS. Without stylesheet downloads, our pre-rendered HTML is subject to FISC . And, without style-fallbacks, we don't get wonderful features like flexbox.

But, all is not lost. Many, if not all, of these problems could be solved if we moved away from rendering CSS to inline styles and instead rendered them to a stylesheet! React already attaches a unique id to each component. It should be possible to grab on to that to abstract our styles, authored as inline, to a stylesheet.

What's Around now

There are a series of good ideas

• react-inline. Seems to solve all of the complaints above (except element queries, but they're not solved by CSS anyway). Though how does the server handle media (or element?) queries?
• react-jss allows you to define CSS in your JS as JSON, insert a <style> tag, and use the referenced classes in your React components. It's a decent approach, but one that requires you write JSON instead of CSS (though maybe there's a way to avoid that?) Ideally, we'd have something like a string template function, or even just a pre-compile step like JSX that allows you to write normal CSS in your JS. I'm also not clear on how the server could pre-compute a stylesheet.
• jsxstyle Has a cool API – it's just more JSX. However, it leads to div-itis which can lead to performance issues. It explicitly doesn't care about semantic tags (e.g. <header>), but these can help with accessibility and human readability.
• Radium. Still uses JS for faux media queries :( There 1.0 roadmap still leaves unanswered questions.
• react-style with react-style-syntax. Is a cool approach. It lets you write CSS instead of JSON, and can extract out a stylesheet for server-side rendering. However, it doesn't support CSS selectors, pseudo-classes and CSS animation.
• styling is a webpack based method to write styles in JS and output a stylesheet. It's very tied to webpack, but does many things right. It's conceptually similar to Radium.
• csjs is a es6 template string that has the same syntax as CSS, but in JS. It works nicely with browserify, can output separate CSS files, supports a CSS modules-style workflow, and might be the best approach I've seen yet.
• Aphrodite is used by Kahn Academy. It's syntax looks a lot like LESS, and is written in JS. Because of this, it has many of the problem of native inline styles: no cascading styles, nor style fallbacks for you. It's also not able to deal with dynamically injected components.
• cssx allows you to write CSS directly in your JS. It's a nice approach to use if you just want your CSS to be in the same file as your JS.
• glamor is a functional approach to inline styles. It's a nice abstraction around common problems like :hover, but hasn't been battle-tested.
• styled-jsx

Looks pretty darn good. I'm not sure how the <style> tags play with a style sheet.
• styletron Focuses on small CSS output by having one class name per rule. This allows faster styles parsing (though I'm not sure about style-recalc time). It solves some issues like media queries but is designed for a style tag, not a CSS file, so the postcss workflow is out-of-band.
• css-template Still does inline styles.
• css-literal-loader for webpack. Gives you CSS in a JS file, but compiles to CSS files. It's pretty nifty, though the community isn't too large.
• styled-components A React-only solution, but one of the leaders in the community right now. Allows you to write real CSS in a JS file, but outputs either inline styles for React tNative or a CSS file for the web. Seems like a decent compromise, even if it's not quite feature complete.
• glamorous is a styled-components fork, that enables all-JavaScript "CSS" authoring. If you like styled-components, but want more control over programatically manipulating styles, this might be a good fit.

Radium has a massive list of most, if not all, inline-style approaches on Github.

Michele Bertoli has a smaller list that shows some different features on Github.

So just use CSS

The css-modules Github organization has an interesting approach with local-scope. It makes the class names human-readable to make debugging easier, adds a lot of other niceties, and can be used with inline-styles where appropriate. This comes the closest to what the "ultimate" solution likely is: Shadow DOM.

One thing to be cautious of when using CSS: avoid the "cascading" part of CSS.

One shortcut we've been taking is a context prop that is more “flexible”, e.g. <Button context='thatDamnPopupMenu'> that becomes .Button--isInThatDamnPopupMenu. This kinda couples the components, but sometimes there's no way to avoid coupling. Like if there's only one place in the app where button's styles are different (usually due to layout) and you can't make up a prop that makes more sense than a generic context. Still, it is absolutely explicit and defined inside Button, so this coupling is visible and colocated with the rest of the Button styles.

via @gaearon

Many thanks to @jmorrell, @vjeux, and @ianobermiller who reviewed drafts and waited patiently for it to be published.

It's actually easy, and doesn't require you to change much if you use an SSL terminator. This will allow you to develop your app without SSL. Many frameworks allow you to turn on SSL as an option, but that's going to be one level of difference between dev and prod. Also, SSL is a bottleneck and you're better off farming this out to a service that does it really well.

bud is a great SSL terminator. It's configurable via JSON, is very fast, and is full-featured.

Let's walkthrough a setup of bud with Docker. Docker does give you an extra layer: even if bud is hacked, they won't get into your app or server. You don't need your main app to be deployed with Docker, but if it already is, this will be even easier.

Get a cert

The first thing you need to do is appease the ridiculousness of the entrenched institutions and get an SSL certificate. Let's Encrypt makes it easy~ish and free. Follow the instructions, but here's the meat of what you need to do:

Generate a private key with:

openssl req \

      -newkey rsa:4096 -nodes -sha256 -keyout domain.key \
       -out domain.csr

Then, on a machine that already has DNS setup for the domain name you want to put under https:

# It assumes that /var/www/example is publicly accessible to the web
letsencrypt certonly --webroot -w /var/www/example -d example.com -d www.example.com

If you're just playing around, this great guide to all things OpenSSL will point you in the right direction to create a self-signed cert. This cert will not be accepted by any browser, but you can use it just to see how things work. If you're doing this, curl -k will be your friend :)

Once you have your keys, DO NOT EXPOSE THEM. Do not email them, put them on Dropbox, or in anyway don't let them leave your computer un-encrypted. If you do, the game is up. You'll need to revoke your cert and create a new one.

Generate a DH Key

You're going to enable perfect forward secrecy so that even if you site is somehow hacked, all your previous traffic will remain encrypted.

Run this, and keep the resulting file.

openssl dhparam -out dh.key 4096

Copy your cert to your sever

You need to ensure your key security, so we'll use ssl to copy things around.

ssh <yoursite>
# on the remote server
mkdir -p /srv/bud/keys
exit
# back on your computer
# copy the key file that you generated
scp cert.key <yoursite>:/srv/bud/keys/cert.key
# copy the public crt generated from Let's Encrypt (or your cert provider)
scp ssl-unified.crt <yoursite>:/srv/bud/keys/ssl-unified.crt
# copy your dh.key file
scp dh.key <yoursite>:/srv/bud/keys/dh.key

bud configuration

Bud is very nicely configured with a JSON file. You can configure if you want, but this a is a good default.

Make a new file with these contents and copy it up to the bud directory. It assumes you'll use docker to run bud. If you don't run your site with Docker, replace backend_port with the port your site runs at (probably 80) and backend_ip with the ip your site runs at (probably 0.0.0.0).

{
  "workers": 10,
  "restart_timeout": 250,
  "log": {
        "level": "notice",
        "facility": "user",
        "stdio": true,
        "syslog": true
    },
  "availability": {
        "death_timeout": 100000,
        "revive_interval": 25000,
        "retry_interval": 250,
        "max_retries": 500
    },
  "frontend": {
        "port": 443,
        "host": "0.0.0.0",
        "keepalive": 3600,
        "security": "tls12",
        "server_preference": true,
        "ssl3": false,
        "max_send_fragment": 1400,
        "allow_half_open": false,
        "npn": ["http/1.1", "http/1.0"],
        "ciphers":"ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES256-SHA256:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES128-SHA256:AES128-SHA",
        "ecdh": "prime256v1",
        "cert": "/data/keys/ssl-unified.crt",
        "key": "/data/keys/cert.key",
        "dh": "/data/keys/dh.key",
        "passphrase": null,
        "request_cert": false
      },
  "balance": "roundrobin",
  "backend": [{
        "port": backend_port,
        "host": "backend_ip",
        "keepalive": 3600,
        "proxyline": false,
        "x-forward": true
      }]
}

scp bud.json <yoursite>:/srv/bud/bud.json

Install the bud docker image

ssh <yoursite>
sudo docker pull joeybaker/bud-tls
sudo docker rm -f bud
# if you run your site with docker
sudo docker run -d -v /srv/bud:/data -p 443:443 --name bud --link <your site docker container>:backend joeybaker/bud-tls
# if you don't run your site with docker
sudo docker run -d -v ~/bud:/data -p 443:443 joeybaker/bud-tls

Done! You have SSL on your site. Verify that things worked at SSLLabs. You should get an A+.

You can also confirm that you're not using SHA2, which is a broken security measure.

Things you can do to improve things

Enable Strict Transport Security Header

This tells modern browsers to prefer SSL. It's highly recommended. If you're running hapi, it's an easy setting to turn on called hsts.

Redirect all non-SSL traffic to SSL

For older browsers, the HSTS header isn't enough. You could use a simple redirector service to redirect all http traffic to https.

Or, this sample code for hapi.js demos how to redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS.

var config = {

   http: {
        uri: 'https://mysite.com'
        , ssl: true
    }
}

https:// force https and handle redirects
server.ext('onRequest', function serverOnRequest(req, next){

 https:// just let robots txt through, otherwise, google complains
  if (req.url.path === '/robots.txt'){
    next()
  }
  https:// enforce ssl
  else if (req.headers['x-forwarded-for'] && !req.raw.req.connection.xForward){
    server.log(['ssl', 'verbose'], 'init ssl')
    req.raw.req.connection.xForward = req.headers['x-forwarded-for']
    next()
  }
  else if (req.raw.req.connection.xForward){
    server.log(['ssl', 'verbose'], 'already ssl')
    https:// proceed fair lady!
    next()
  }
  else {
    if (config.http.ssl){
      server.log(['ssl', 'verbose'], 'redirect to SSL')
      next({statusCode: 301}).redirect(config.http.uri + req.url.path)
    }
    else next()
  }
})

Note: This post used to recommend using StartSSL to get your cert. That's a bad idea.

These articles follow a similar pattern. They pick an issue to illustrate why SF is better or worse than NYC. Interviews and anecdotal evidence ensue. Inevitably, the NYT author comes to a judgment that either SF is too weird or that NYC's approach is superior.

These NYT authors all seem to miss the larger meme. Despite their collective insistence that NYC is just as capable as SF of hosting the tech capital of the world, it doesn't, and maybe can't. Put aside the high rents, crazy fashion, offbeat culture, and stream of bad ideas, SF is the 16th century Venice of today.

Some examples of this in action: (I'll add more as I read them and laugh)

• Major companies are doing business without the advice of NYC bankers. No ill effects observed.. 'Look at those crazies in California! They'll learn their lesson when it all blows up in their face and NYC becomes the center of the world again'.
• 'Look how weird San Francisco houses are!'
• 'Let's setup a straw man argument: San Francisco has no "noir". How unhistorical!'
• "Adults" are needed to run serious companies, like JP Morgan NYT writer takes the bad behavior of one Uber executive and wishes tech companies were better at customer respect and privacy. Contrasting to JP Morgan is both New York centric, and laughable given JP Morgan's record.
• Tech employees are dumb, and they should feel dumb This is somewhere between: "tech company doesn't know what it's doing" to "those tech company employees think they have it good, but they really don't". I love the complete oversight that NYC favorite banks don't ever get mentioned.
• #longreads meets the worst parts of tech journalism, sponsored by The Times "this is tech journalism at its sexist worst."
• The CEO of Slack politely educates a reporter on how VC funding works This reads more like a Hacker News post than an interview with a CEO one of the fastest growing companies in the history of the world.
• "His youthful manner, which practically screams 'Silicon Valley,' was a selling point." Nothing shows respect for a public company CEO who's launching a new product like making the lede about the fact he dropped out of college.
• Silicon Valley is so caught up in it's own fame, it fails at business This post singles out Marc Andreessen as representative of a trend of VCs focusing more on Hollywood star power than on business. The subtext is that real investors don't get distracted by fame which is, naturally, untrue. The whole thing in anecdotal and seems oblivious of the increased risk that venture capital entails.
• This one app failed, so all apps are a fad "Secret’s trajectory illustrates the flash-in-the-pan nature of Silicon Valley’s current technology boom. Even as a handful of start-ups rise to stratospheric valuations and take in billions of dollars in financing, other privately held companies cannot sustain their following."
• Besides negatively invoking the Gold Rush, let's exaggerate the craziness of those Californians. "It is a wild time in Silicon Valley. Two-year-old companies are valued in the billions, ramshackle homes are worth millions and hubris has reached the point where otherwise sane businesspeople muse about seceding from the United States."
• Using interviews to support a biased, fear-mongering, opinion. This article will be declared unbiased because it contains interviews from both sides of the "debate".

• It took a day longer than I thought for The Times to turn Reddit/Gawker into a trend story.

  — Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) July 22, 2015

• Let's take the word of a few disgruntled employees and condemn a company that confounds Wall Street
• Remember how cars were a fad? So is Tech.
• A few startups aren't doing as well as they were, therefore the whole tech industry is doomed! Also, let's compare VC to mutual funds, because the risks are similar right?
• News: A startup has a bad exit! Startups are risky! … oh wait. This happens all the time.
• The "Frightful 5" tech companies form an oligarchy the controls… something Nevermind that corporate oligarchies are rife in large US industries and blatant falsehoods like Cisco not continuing to dominate it's space.
• Fearmongering unicorn and strawman bubbles
• Dancing on the newly proclaimed grave of Twitter Nearly gleeful that Twitter is struggling, there's no hesitation in reminding us readers that Twitter was never a real business to start with.
• If the "unicorns" go, the whole thing goes! Just because we saw high valuations in a few dozen companies, it doesn't mean that the whole industry is overvalued.
• Even those crazies in California want the tech economy to collapse The NYT makes the claim, after talking to some activists, that everyone in SF wants the tech economy to bust.
• A former Newsweek writer to complain about young managers firing people for being older. This should have been a piece on Theory Y vs X management. But it became a vaguely veiled anecdote on the discrimination in Tech.
• In which the NYT conflates homelessness and crime Not only is per capita a bad measure of crime because some many people commute into San Francisco, but homelessness doesn't lead to crime.
• Do you love music? Silicon Valley doesn't The title arrogantly stereotypes a whole geography with a platitude. This is just another example of how the NYT, based in old-media centric New York, prefers to defend the established businesses focused on intellectual property over supporting innovation.
• Google does great, but we can't believe they're throwing away good money instead of maximizing the bottom line! Innovation costs too much.
• As more science shows technology is good for us, we'll try to defend the smaller and smaller corner we're painting ourselves into.
• Silicon Valley isn't cool. You know what's cool? China. Mostly because they have QR codes.
• This one time, it wasn't Silicon Valley's fault. But, just remember that most of the time it is: 90% of venture capital investments fail.
• Let's pick a controversial news topic and interview one person about how their company doesn't apply!
• Writer has a bad experience when prices go up; insists that the whole product sector is defunct.. Economics of course have nothing to do with it.
• Let's interview a crazy SF anarchist (hey, she's "self-described"' don't blame us if she's crazy, we all know anarchists aren't real political thinkers) about her 500 person email list and her homeless candidate for a minor municipal regulatory committee.
• Let's take one unicorn and abstract it's problems to the idea that all equity is fundamentally flawed!
• Let's find a few examples of Silicon Valley people making stupid decisions and blame an entire generation for all that silly technology stuff they do.
• There are no fraudsters in banking or other real jobs, so let's throw stones in this glass house!
• The New York Times likes to use SF as the example of what's wrong with America. Never mind the problems with other cities, let alone … gasp … New York.
• What can we say positive about Tech? I know! A puff piece on a successful company that isn't in Silicon Valley! To make sure we get the point across, let's spend the lede talking about those silly incubators those techies use.
• This is the epitome of all NYT posts. Silicon Valley does trivial things and the world has "real" problems. Oh, and we're basing this on only one named example and a blind eye toward any the contrary evidence.
• The NYT is shocked—shocked—to find that large tech companies act like large companies everywhere. Painting the disparity between tech companies which support the GOP and Tech workers who do not. Which is just like nearly all companies everywhere. Also half of the companies in the lede are not based in Silicon Valley.
• San Francisco is so bad, they don't have children anymore! We'll show you a bunch of stats and quotes to prove that. But we won't ask why or show you the trend line. That would be context or "journalism".
• Can you believe that other people actually like the Silicon Valley culture!? Oh wait, it's the Chinese. They're weird and scary. Never mind.
• What a shock, a country more valuable than most nations lobbies the president of the US.
• Silicon Valley is a complete mess because… real estate.
• Guess what? There are jerks in tech too! (Oh, and they are just like our jerks in banking)
• NYT focuses on sexual harassment and VC. They could have done an article on bankers just by swapping words
• Told in the grand context of the stock market, tech industry execs went to The Whitehouse to help the government buy newer tech. How dare they act as businesses! Also, why can't they keep their stock prices from fluctuating!?
• In which the fear-mongering click-bait headline doesn't match the content which goes on to disprove the headline.
• Replace tech company with bank, or really just company. Economic inequality isn't an industry trend – it spans the economy. Oh, and they admit the entire article is BS
• Tech is evil because it's different! Also, those techies want to make money. This is the new peak of the anti-tech backlash that wishes the engineers would just go back to silently making everyone's lives better and stop trying to run a business. The tech industry is the current world focus, as finance, and industrialization were before. As with all industries, there are bad actors, but that doesn't make the whole industry evil.
• Technology companies are unregulated and coddled. It's either them or sex trafficking and never-mind that free-speech stuff.
• Did you know Technology is a whole industry now!?
• How dare those techies build offices!
• Now that tech companies are on the stock exchange, these VCs are geniuses! The companies are still shit, but look at all that money! Clearly the NYT is well-positioned to decree which VCs to pay attention to.
• Let's get a bunch of people who complain about Silicon Valley to complain about Silicon Valley.
• All these companies are loosing money! Even some of the public ones! It's a bubble! Never mind making bets and loosing money is the business model of VCs. It's business via experimentation. The horror.
• Let’s pick a few extremists that happen to live in Silicon Valley to make a fear-mongering argument that the place is hypocritical and doing us all harm.
• Sound tech companies hire ethics officers? Why don’t any other companies have them? Oh, because ethics should be engrained into company culture? It’s not a bolt-on responsibility? Why are tech companies special? What does it mean for Silicon Valley to "grow up"?
• Despite acknowledging that NYC is the pinnacle of the squeezing out the middle class problem, somehow west coast cities, and San Francisco in particular, become the boogeymen.
• Nothing like perpetuating the idea of the coming tech backlash that the NYT has been the leading champion of.
• The NYT is weirdly obsessed enough with tech elite to cover the guy who picks through Zuck's trash. Of all the cities in the world where this happens, (including NYC) why pick this guy?

More near-term support for the “graying industry” view of technology came two weeks ago from Goldman Sachs. The economy may be doing nicely and corporate capital spending picking up, but it will not help the technology industry much, according to the investment bank’s survey of corporate spending plans. In 2005, corporate spending on information technology will rise less than 4 percent, the Goldman analysts predicted. “Technology looks to be firmly in the cyclical category for now,” the report stated.

If anyone can be trusted to say the new information economy is a fad, and hasn't replaced the mass media economy. It's the largest New York Bank telling the New York Mass Media it's so.

Yet another, somewhat longer, view suggests that America’s technology industry will not inevitably decline. The more optimistic outlook rests not on the prospects for Wall Street investors, but on the nature of information technology.

Oh, right. If we look past what short-term stock investment obsessed analysts say, it's pretty obvious that Silicon Valley represents a fundamental shift in how business is done.

Medsphere Systems is a start-up that hopes to bring the open-source software formula to hospitals.

Let's take a left turn to look at anecdotal evidence from one company focused on one sector of the Technology industry.

• The NYT rallies against Amazon as a "bruising workplace", and then doubles down in an op-ed:

Amazon — and, to be sure, any number of other companies as well — has taken this idea to its logical extreme: Bring people in, shape them in the Amazon style of confrontation and workaholism, and cast them aside when they have outlived their usefulness.

Joe Nocera

But,

The back and forth between Amazon and the Times and the conversation it has generated is a perfect meta-narrative for the tension between technology companies and media companies.

Emily Bell

• a few crap products mean that a whole sector of technology, generally agreed on as inevitable, is useless
• Robots are taking all the jobs! An excellent bit of fear-mongering motivated by an attempt to get more in touch with Trump's base.
• A lot of words to state that Pinterest has been struggling to grow, but they "discovered” localized content and are now growing. Somehow, struggling to figure out growth is not the "Silicon Valley way"?
• There’s nothing more callous than ancient Roman philosophy brought to modern times—especially when we can pain the whole of Silicon Valley as douchebags!
• OMG! Young people are gonna be rich!

The New York times is just collecting the confusion that New Yorkers feel when looking at San Francisco. It's a shame that the confusion exists, but … first they laugh at you…

Later…

Act 1 of This American Life's It's Not the Product, It's the Person is a great example of New York 'old media' just not understanding how Silicon Valley works.

Alex Bloomberg pitches his new podcast company, asking $1.5 million dollars in seed funding. He shows an ignorance for how venture capital works, amazement at how business-like getting funding is, and arrogance in carpetbagging.

I've loved Planet Money, and Mr. Bloomberg in it, but this was very frustrating to listen to.

There is not enough office or living space in San Francisco because of the "humanitarian" laws passed over the last century. Ignorance of basic economics and community backlash make addressing the problem nearly impossible.

The median rent in San Francisco is higher than the median income in the United States. Just a cool $50,200 a year hanging over your head.

Greg Wester (@gwestr) May 28, 2015

Rent Control

Rent control does not control rents. It suppresses prices; which increases demand; which decreases supply. That should increase prices and complete the cycle, but … rent control.

We're left with suppressed prices in rent controlled buildings and inflated prices in new buildings. New buildings target the upper classes that can afford the high prices, and zoning laws prevent us from tearing down old homes. Rent control should help the lower classes. The irony. The mismanagement. Only the wealthy are benefiting from the current situation. Rent Control is a Bad Idea.

Affordable Housing

Is is messy for all the same reasons as rent control, but with the additional complexities. City governments have proven they're either corrupt or incapable of managing large construction projects. San Francisco is particularly susceptible to these problems.

Building Ceiling

“It appears the Giants have touched all the bases with this revised project,” Agnos said. “And those bases are: reasonable heights, increased affordable housing, open space and neighborhood-serving retail to bring some spark to what is an unfinished neighborhood. Assuming all this bears out in the writing of the measure, I think they have done a terrific job of revising the project.”

via Giants add affordable housing, shorten heights in building plan

San Francisco is a six by six mile square of land edged on 3 sides by ocean with a mountain range in the middle. There's only so much space to put people, it long ago hit the limit, and more and more people want to move it. If the city wants to expand, it can only do so by building vertically. The laws of physics and whatnot.

Just to fill the existing deficit, the Building Industry Association of the Bay Area, which represents home builders, projects that the region should be permitting 2,224 units per month on average, or about 27,000 per year.

Bay Area building boom may not end housing shortage

Yet, the city's people seem intent on "maintaining the character of the city" or "protecting the environment" by capping new buildings to four stories. There are exceptions, but the areas that are slated for development cover a comparatively small portion of the city. Futher, landlords are not incentivized to build further—rental payments are big business and keeping supply low keeps prices high.

Miami took the opposite approach: it provided a larger area for new growth which it has enjoyed while keeping it's cultural communities. New people will move to the city, shutting them out doesn't work for either group.

Over the past two decades, San Francisco has produced an average of 1,500 new housing units per year. Compare this with Seattle (another 19th century industrial city that now has a tech economy), which has produced about 3,000 units per year over the same time period

The San Francisco Exodus

Oakland, right across the bay from San Francisco, has enacted policies to encourage building and has now passed more new housing units per capita.

Again, the inept city government helps no one. Ballot measures like 2014's Prop B, which are confusingly worded do all they can to work with special interests and not the interests of the city's future.

The problem is that San Francisco won't build housing, and making matters worse, residents work tirelessly to prevent more housing from being built.

…let's look at what San Francisco has in fact built. Not very much! Between 2005 and 2015, San Francisco (city/county) added 26,770 new units, according to housing permits data provided by Trulia. That's one-quarter of the housing units built in the San Francisco metro area, one-half of what was built in the San Jose metro area, and just 17 percent of the total units across the entire Bay Area. Sad.

What's Really to Blame for San Francisco's Housing Crisis

Tenderloin

Search for a San Francisco Crime Map and look for the red area. It's a small neighborhood, centrally located in the city, near the high-market shopping district.

The Loin is a great location, mandated by turn of the century laws to maintain single occupancy apartments, supposedly for migrant labor. The Loin is trying to become a modern, crime free, property, but it's completely hamstrung by crazy laws, outdated thinking (what homeless person can afford $1000/month in rent?), and political non-starers (we can't make all those poor people homeless). The Loin is ripe for revitalization. Forget the 100 year old zoning laws, allow the community to start modernizing itself.

Lack of built-out Suburbs

The growth of new housing has slowed way down. A lot of the pressure would come off San Francisco if outlying cities would allow growth. Instead, most suburbs fall victim to the NIMBY syndrome.

This leaves the city in a cycle of ever increasing rents. As richer people move into higher priced homes, the slightly less rich move to slightly cheaper housing slightly further from the city center. This forces the even less rich to move further out.

As the central circles of housing fill with increasingly richer populations, the less rich are forced to move further out. The upper classes in the middle of the city then want to keep their high-rent quaint 3-story Victorians instead of building large apartments. Which perpetuates the cycle.

A Few Concrete Things To Do

Without a solution, San Francisco rents are going to remain outrageous. Already, I see people moving away from the city to live in surrounding areas and commuting into the city. While some of this is inevitable, Oakland is a major city in its own right, and it has reasonable rents, and is on the upswing.

The city should do the following:

• Remove the red tape around building high rise buildings. Many are going up near Market Street, but there are many more areas that can be built on and the city needs the housing and office capacity. Cheap housing markets build housing. Building works! There's a mostly older generation that don't want new buildings in their neighborhood. Push building through anyway.
• Phase out rent control. Start in just a few areas of the city and remove rent control from new leases. Areas like the Sunset and Potrero Hill might be good places to start.
• Maybe we should start reducing road width to add more buildings.
• Do away with Prop 13 which raises property values by keeping supply artificially low.
• Remove the incredible corruption in the city government
• Incentivize more development, even if people don't support it. More supply means lower rents. Even adding up-market units decreases overall rental prices. Perhaps even place that housing near public transit to help break the cycle of pushing the less-wealthy further out of the city center.

San Francisco only recently got the spotlight away from Silicon Valley. If it's not careful, it'll price itself right back out.

Also Read

There are many great links in the article, but you can also read:

• I'm not a big TechCrunch fan, but this essay is a great summary of the entire problem.

Mastercard's CEO recently said that cash costs the economy about 1% of GDP. He mentions this by way of saying that his credit card company sees cash has its primary competition.

Huh? Credit cards charge between 3-5% of a transaction. Cash is about 3x cheaper. This is why virtual currencies are exciting. They offer a method to digital send cash that doesn't cost as much as credit cards.

Between Benchmark Capital and Andreesen Horwitz there have been two top-tier VCs who are betting on the medium-term success of Bitcoin. Benchmark's investments to date don't hint at a long bet on virtual currency. VCs are getting into to disrupt credit card companies' cut from the bottom up.

Investing in a new type of financial company has not been successful. Square is mostly a POS system and Simple ultimately gave up trying to build a new bank. Virtual currency is a way to side-step the whole problem. By refusing to play the in the same game as the banks and credit card companies, undercutting is possible.

A cash replacement doesn't have to be much different from virtual currencies in games or gift cards. Both are widely accepted by customers. Bitcoin isn't the point. The point is finding an alternative to credit cards for online payments.

I'm not sure that Bitcoin, the brand will win, but virtual currency and the blockchain are fundamental technologies that will shape the world!

I’d guess that hierarchies have an inflection point of effectiveness at some point in a population. A project with three people don't need much structure. At twenty, some hierarchy is necessary. A thousand people need a strong hierarchy. I'm not sure what the numbers really are, but they must be somewhat related to Dunbar's number and a 2 million-year genetic disposition toward family groups.

The individuals involved must change the numbers. But, so will the available technology, which can remove whole sections from the bottom of a hierarchy tree. This leads to a flatter hierarchy. Some examples:

• Email enabled direct communication, eliminating the typing pool, mail boys, and filing assistants.
• Manufacturing automation (soon 3D printing) eliminated factory workers' jobs. This has the secondary effect of eliminating related hierarchies like unions.

When I worked at a flat organization, we organized into small teams of about 5-7 people. Each team was solely responsible for a project or a unique component of a larger project.

What we missed, was giving these teams need an official leader. That leader should be accountable the highest practical level and be an active contributor to the daily work. Spotify, for example, works like this.

Further Reading

A great summary of the organization structures at small-to-medium sized tech companies that I’ve seen.

Scaling an organization is about maintaining an individual's sense of accountability.

Decisions still happened, but without an agreed-upon process, there was no accountability. … “The goal of consensus,” the handbook continued, “is not the selection of several options, but the development of one decision which is the best for the whole group. It is synthesis and evolution, not competition and attrition.” … Consensus consistently empowered cranks, malcontents, and even provocateurs to lay claim to a group’s attention and gum up the works…

via The Theology of Consensus

A post with a very comprehensive reading list ​ Holocracy is causing a 50% higher turn-over rate for Zappos

Github's flat organization peaked at about 300 people. They're moving to a more hierarchical structure

The FCC should not allow the Comcast and Time Warner merger. It would consolidation the ISP industry and strengthen the two geographic monopolies.

The proposed reasons for this merger are an attempt to mislead the FCC and the Public. Comcast promises:

Together, Comcast and Time Warner Cable will make life online better for more people by bringing faster Internet speeds, a more reliable and more secure network, net neutrality protection, low-cost Internet access, and programming diversity to millions of new customers across the country.

Each of the promises are things the public and a good regulatory environment desire, but do not require a merger. That quote is laughable – both company are working against each of these promises. A larger monopoly is not an incentive to improve. A few points to counter the idea that Comcast or Time Warner are acting in good faith:

• Comcast and Time Warner rarely increase Internet speeds in existing coverage areas. It seems as though competition from a small player with better service is the only thing that will bring increased speeds.
• Both Comcast and Time Warner have repeatedly acted to stifle competition in their geographic monopolies. Previously, Comcast sited Time Warner's competition as a reason to allow its merger with NBC. Given the lack of any significant new competition, this merger would increase monopoly power.
• Both Comcast and Time Warner have lobbied against Net Neutrality
• Current regulatory measures of Internet providers are inadequate. The US is falling in rankings comparing Internet speeds across countries. Permitting the continuation of the status quo with this merger will only exasperate the problem.
• "Programming diversity" is not something that either company is lacking. The Public's need is not 'another 100 channels for another $15 dollars a month ($25 dollars a month after the first year).' The growing section of the content market is Internet based, and relies on net neutrality, not programming deals.
• Time Warner has a track record for raising rates. There is nothing to suggest that given more monopoly power, there would be an incentive to lower rates.

The FCC should reject this merger based on anti-trust regulations.

Startups began to realize that a team of engineers without a few designers produced a product no one wanted to use, and began to heavily value designers.

Here's the investment trend: VCs are now looking to fund designers. A few years ago, a designer would have been laughed out of a pitch room if they came in with mockups and no working product. Nowadays, in part due to the Lean Startup movement, and in part due to the recognition that Apple gives to good design in the mobile world, design is no longer seen as an engineering problem, but a first class issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNqs_S-zEBY SpaceX is exploring methods for engineers to accelerate their workflow by designing more directly in 3D.

The 20 year trend is for many of our basic engineering problems to be easily solved. We're already seeing that trend with the rise of open source, modular programing and development of tools that a non-developer could potentially use to create an application noflo and Codiqa.

We're just starting to realize the potential of 3D printing. OpenDesk, which enables a 3D printer to make furniture, launched today. There are many legal and political challenges to overcome, but the potential of superseding mass manufacturing is huge.

3D printing + a huge library of solved engineering problems + easy-to-use software will put us in a place where instead of buying a product to solve a problem, we'll just design and make it ourselves.

1. Big data is collected from consumers either in exchange for free services or surreptitiously.
2. Using powerful computers and good software, this dataset can be aggregated and analyzed to make unintuitive predictions.
3. If the analysis is accurate and/or timely, these predictions can be used to, effectively, tell the future. This could enable the datas' owner to contend with traditional economic and sovereign powers.

Put succinctly: Modern A.I. uses powerful computing to make unintuitive predictions based on aggregation and quality analysis of data.

That's a good observation; Lanier then points out two consequences to this arrangement.

The power to effectively predict the future relies on data, good software, and powerful computers. Prerequisites that put this ability out of the reach of the average individual, and into the hands of a concentrated few.

Second, while algorithms can be created, and computers bought, data must be gathered from many other people. This reliance on other people with little to no compensation to them, strikes Lanier as unfair.

Lanier's suggestion, therefore is that we adopt a series of rules around data online and enact a mircopayments scheme to ensure that everyone is appropriately paid for their data.

Wishes and Dreams

I've not read Who Owns the Future, and a good deal of the above summary is my extrapolation based on what Lanier said elsewhere, but the idea of framing A.I. as a source of power that controls the digital economy is worth looking at.

Certainly, the case is convincing that the banking industry with high-frequency trading, insurance companies maximizing profits while minimizing risk, and Google's ads, are able to profit and leverage forms of soft power. They do this with a massive dataset.

However, data collection from users, in many cases, compensates the users with free services. While this might be morally devious, there is compensation.

Data can also be public, as with the stock data that high-frequency traders use.

Surreptitious data collection, is the real problem.

Lanier would likely agree that data should only be collected if the user agrees, but his proposed way to get there is …difficult. He references Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu, suggests a micropayments scheme that hinges on fundamental changes to our digital infrastructure:

1. Data must be canonical. Currently, URLs can be changed, copy and paste is a colloquialism. We need a scheme in which a piece of data is the sole version of it's type.
2. Data must be immutable. Currently data can be deleted at no cost. Sites disappear from the Internet all the time. You can easily delete an excel doc on your computer.
3. Use of data should leave a trace. Currently, sites accessing your purchase history from your credit card company do not notify you.

This vision of the future is very enticing from a technical level, but we're many stages away from being able to implement it.

It's long been a dream of "web 3.0" that the Internet could be a series of "machine-readable" documents. This has not materialized because the standards for how to make data machine-readable are notoriously difficult to pin down.

Machine readability needs to be accomplished before Xanadu, so that data can be verified and the "rules" enforced.

Standards Tactics

The web is a series of servers and software agreeing to operate around a set of principles. These protocols (or standards), are usually generally agreed on but the specifics can vary quite a bit.

Standards like HTML, CSS, HTTP, TLS, SSL, et al, all work because developers opt to implement them. If a site is different from the standard, it behaves oddly. Users are likely notice. Unfortunately, there's no way to similarly police standards on data integrity.

URLs are a generally agreed on, but the specifics get wonky. Everyone agrees on .com. what what comes after the slash? IDs or descriptive URLs? Query parameters or path names? Dates or titles? Even developer principles like REST are highly contentious. If a computer had to guess what lived on a random page based solely on the URL … well, that's how Google makes the big bucks.

URLs are just a part of the problem. Perhaps, if data was truly machine-readable, we would have a way of determining if it was canonical without depending on a standardization of URL schemes. Of course, machine-readability is still in it's early stages.

Data immutability could then be enforced by some sort of cryptographic system similar to Bitcoin's that focuses on ownership and history. Bitcoin works because each piece of currency is constructed out of a permanent record of all previous transactions. Such a system could would allow for data to be updated while remaining canonical and immutable.

Ensuring data is always protected against deletion or downtime is a tough proposition. Determining who actually owns data is difficult.

If that could be solved, perhaps a system of owner reputation cloud be tied to the availability of all of their data. I've been impressed by a Yelp like system of personal reputation presented in Daniel Suarez's sci-fi Deamon series in which every person gets rated on a dual scale of 5 points, and the number of reviews. Of course, true identity is necessary, and that's another problem. Regardless, ownership is necessary to deliver notifications on access. So, add a requirement to the list:

1. Data must be canonical. Data should be accessible by only one URI, and should be verifiable as unique.
2. Data must be immutable. It should not be possible to delete data. Changes should be recorded.
3. Use of data should leave a trace. Access and modification should be recorded and the owner notified.
4. Data must have an owner. A "responsible party" is attached to all data, and they're ultimately responsible for ensuring the rules are followed.

Even notification is a hard problem. It's not practical to send an email every time someone looks up your email address. A log file would need to live somewhere and isn't particularly user friendly. A new system would have to be built.

This might all be possible in a highly centralized system – the very thing that we'd like to avoid. Developing a set of protocols to describe all of this has a massive adoption problem. I don't see a path toward getting here.

That's no surprise. Banner ads suck. "Sponsored" content isn't much better. Promised innovations have been disappointing. But, advertising could be something that helps both customer and seller.

Twitter will have an advertising business, ready in the near future, and available to partners.

Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO

It seems like Pintrest is uniquely qualified to build an advertising platform that users really will like. It could become is an organized database that maps products to the interested customers.

From it's inception, Pintrest has been the proverbial corkboard in a 16 year old girl's room. It's mostly personal notes and memories. Things the she likes or wants. It's because she shares what she wants, that Pintrest is in a place replace social coupon sites (e.g. Groupon).

The Pintrest user base is growing and it's users are primarily women, who like coupons.

Pintrest could examine all the products saved in their database, when that product reaches a critical mass, they can offer a coupon to all the users who have saved the product. Easy. Pintrest charges the seller a percentage of gross sales.

The dual viral effects of encouraging users to use Pintrest for the chance of a coupon, and the impetus to encourage more people to save the product are great for Pintrest. Sellers get qualified leads. Customers get a discount. Everyone wins.

The process looks like this: I save a link to a pair of shoes I want. So do 5000 other people. Pintrest calls up Nike and says, "we have a list of 5000 folks who all want your shoes." Nike gives them the green light, and they send an email to all their users with a 15% off coupon if they purchase the shoes over the next weekend. 20% if they buy online today.

Of course this is just the simple stuff. If I have a board of recipes, maybe I get a coupon for a common ingredient. Or maybe Pintrest looks at the things I've pinned, extrapolates based on similar people, and offers other products for me to pin.

The third iteration could look at the non-products I pin. Vacation pictures? Offer trips of similar distance to different areas. Lots of yoga pins? Offer yoga lessons.

Over time, Pintrest will get all kinds of interesting data to share will sellers: the average conversion rate of the people who have expressed interest in the product, other things their customers are interested in, etc…

There are some tough spots. Pintrest will not want to be a product site that spams its users with coupons. So, maybe these are once-weekly coupons that only come out on Thursday. Customers have through the weekend to use them, perhaps with a special bonus if they are used the same day.

Pintrest could offer coupons for pinning. That's worth a hell of a lot more than a like on a Facebook page — to both the company and the customer.

Of course, this isn't limited to Pintrest. Any social site could do this, it's just that Pintrest is in a unique position to make it happen.

Pintrest Introduces Banner Ads 19 Sept, 2013

Today, Pintrest announced that they'll start showing ads along with its normal content. Instead of offering users products they want, Pintrest is jumping ahead a step and offering products users might want.

They're doing this on a newly built recommendation system, which hasn't have the benefit of being tested against the simpler process of determining products users have already identified themselves as wanting. It's very likely, as with most recommendation systems, (especially new ones) that Pintrest's ads will, at least initially, be subpar.

I'm sure Pintrest will make money off their ads, but it's so unimaginative, so business-as-usual, that's it's strikingly disappointing.

Phase 1 complete! 5, Oct, 2013

But things have changed:

• We have good package managers now. It's possible to reuse components across several projects in a way that's more meaningful than copy/paste. Of course, this comes with the small downside that it's now possible to update a dependency and break something.
• Other people change code and break things. Make them aware that something is broken. This isn't a new problem, but…
• Web developments has moved from developing sites to developing apps, which are more complex and interdependent. It's possible to break components by adding or changing others.
• Cross browser testing sucks. But not more than running your own selenium server. Now, we can do that in the cloud, and automate everything.

The last point is clutch. Nothing is more painful than cross-browser testing (and ensuring that you actually tested everything). If there's a way to automate that, the pain becomes well worth it.

Defensive Testing

Writing tests is still work, and the trick is to balance the number of tests written. I've found the best approach is to write tests in a defensive manner: Defend against forgetfulness, ignorance, or frustration.

• If your thing will be used by other people (or you in 6 months) your tests should be comprehensive enough to describe the thing you built.
• If your thing will be relied on for other people's thing, your tests should be comprehensive enough to ensure them that your thing isn't broken when they have a problem.
• If your thing will be modified by other people, your tests should yell at them when they break it.
• If your using something, break it, and then manage to fix it; write a test for it.

Following these guidelines seems to work pretty well.

While I have nothing against capitalism, it's important to realize that the telecom industry, and ISPs in particular do not follow capitalistic principles.

Normally, a company should do what it likes with its product, but there are two major reasons against allowing ISPs to do so:

• In a free market, companies shouldn't need regulation, however, the ISPs operate as a monopoly (or in rare cases a duopoly) environment. It is most likely ISPs abuse the power the monopolistic practices have lent them with intention to increase profits. While profit is good, it should not come at the short-term, non-monetary, expense of the customer.
• The internet, as a communications medium has become essential to democracy, it is unacceptable for a country that values free speech to allow the Internet to become fragmented into separate networks. Publishing on the web means must mean the entire web.

ISPs argue that they need to charge more to "recover costs" of building the network infrastructure could be re-phrased as: we want to make more money. It's not the regulator's job to allow infringement of customer and citizen rights to help industry make up for a poorly planned business model and shareholders' demand for continual growth.

"Recover costs" is a straw man argument. If true, it assumes that ISPs are not capable of paying off the cost they incurred building their infrastructure and will eventually need to shut down their networks. Bullshit.

ISPs have very nice profits, and could amortize the cost of building infrastructure over the years that the network is in existence, budget to keep the networks active, expand the networks to accommodate more paying customers, and still keep up nice profit margins. Hell, that's what they are doing!

Not that anyone should deny ISPs the right to expand their businesses. Let me offer some alternatives to destroying the détente that is Net Neutrality:

1. Become a competitive industry. ISPs may think that current monopolies allow them to charge more and get away with terrible customer service, but it's harmful in the long run. Monopolies bequeath power, but entice stagnation. In any business – but especially the technology business – stagnation means the death. ISPs should compete with each other in the same geographic areas. There should be not one, or two choices, but six, seven, or eight. Failure to compete is valuing short-term monetary gains over long-term company health. Someone will disrupt you.
2. Get into the obsolescence business. Resume charging for modems and routers, then, upgrade your networks – constantly. Not maintenance upgrades that don't do anything but change protocols, but legitimate upgrades that give real increased speed. If networks followed Moore's law and doubled in speed every 18 months, you'd have a legitimate hardware business on your hands.
3. Promote online paid services. What if Comcast charged me an extra $20/month, but I got a Flickr Pro account ($25), Economist subscription ($110), Wall Street Journal subscription ($103), Evernote Premium ($45), Hulu Plus ($96), and/or Amazon Prime ($80) annually? ISPs should leverage what they have – intimate access to customers without sacrificing their customer's interests.
4. Go international. Hard yes. But ISPs in Europe do it. Not only does the international market have a huge number of new customers, but it would do ISPs good to see how the rest of the world actually competes.
5. Produce original content. Just because we don't want ISPs to favor their own content, doesn't mean they can't have, or make money from original content. Charge for access à la Fancast. Not seeing the adoption you like? Make the product a viable alternative to TV (see: Hulu Premium). There's a nut to be cracked around Internet TV, and it's really mystifying why the ISPs aren't all over this one.

Additional Links

• The argument against Net Neutrality; http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa507.pdf and the proper responses: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2033652
• Steve Wozniak, inventor of the PC, aptly demonstrates how ISPs have screwed the consumer before, will likely do it again on the Internet if given the chance. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/steve-wozniak-to-the-fcc-keep-the-internet-free/68294
• The FCC, and the government as a whole, as proved many times that it fundamentally misunderstands the web and is letting industry set policy, action and law: http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/21/fcc-we-didnt-impose-stricter-net-neutrality-regulations-on-wir/
• Why everyone hates the new net neutrality regulations http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/why-everyone-hates-new-net-neutrality-ruleseven-nn-supporters.ars

Death Valley in January is a wacky place. Death Valley is a wacky place.

In a few months, Cottonwood Canyon (no joke - some cowboy named it.) will regularly be over 100ºF in a few months. But in January, days are a cool 50º and nights are a freezing 20º.

My group of three spent five days backpacking through the western mountains of Death Valley in 2008. I got to carry 10 lbs of camera gear in addition to my 40lb pack. A Nikon D70 body (old, used, but operable and I don't care too much if it gets banged up), a polarizer, a Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8, a Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 micro, loads of batteries, 20GB of CF cards, and a pack of microfiber cloths. Except in the roughest of terrain, I keep the camera slung from my pack in front of me. The rest of gear I stow in my pack with an insert from my Domke bag. Using the Domke insert is the best solution I've come up with to keep the gear padded on a backpacking trip, if you've got a better one, I'd love to hear it.

When I'm backpacking, I keep the 17-35mm on my camera most of the time. It's a tack-sharp wide-angle that makes it great for landscapes, and the low aperture makes ideal for the quick portrait or in low light. It's a heavy lens, but it's short, and worth it. The polarizer never leaves the lens. (If you've never tried a polarizer, do it. Now. This will be here when you get back.)

The macro lens serves double as a telephoto lens. 105mm isn't enough to do any bird photography, but it works great for most large wildlife, and a true macro usually comes in more handy (also: the it weighs only a little over a pound, a good tele starts is over five).

Backpacking while photographing is an interesting challenge when you're with a bunch of non-photographers who are more focused on getting to a good place to camp before dark than waiting for the perfect light. I've often found that the secret to convincing others to play along is to take plenty of pictures of the people in the group – everyone loves a new Facebook photo. I also volunteer to take up the rear – I've found that people are more inclined to let you play if they don't feel like they're waiting for you.

The image above is just a taste of the wackiness that we found in Death Valley. For real wackiness, take a look at the whole set on flickr.

Twitter shorthand and late hour  what it was, I presume that Prof. Jarvis meant that he doesn't intend to focus on the technological or sociological generational gaps, and will instead attempt to observe/predict how the future will unfold.

Though I primarily agree with Prof. Jarvis's thesis that publicity is the new default state, I would urge him to take a closer look at the generational problems. Based on personal, anecdotal, evidence that older generations – even people in my own millennial generation – I can say that society isn't comfortable with publicness.

The average lifespan in the US is 78 years and the most of the population is over 30. The majority of the population doesn't fall into Gen Y (which grew up with the Internet), nor the generation after us which doesn't remember cassette tapes, nor most of Prof. Jarvis' generation, that mostly, aren't as well adapted to the social implications of the internet.

Professor – I am pretty much sold on your thesis, but I'd predict that most are not. I don't think we can afford to wait 50+ years for those not acclimated to the Internet to be replaced by younger generations.

I'm eagerly looking forward to your book, even more so than the last. I am hoping, that you can make a case that my mother can understand and sympathize with. Without her generation's, we'll be waiting more than 50 years for your observations and predictions to become reality.

I don't want to wait that long.

The above has been a late night post brought to you by a tired writer who has stared at too much PHP all day. Please excuse the sloppiness.

Privacy is too minor an issue to justify its complexity. As long as Facebook continues to make privacy hard to understand, and invisible to the user the issue will remain relegated only to users who are in-the-know. The latest round of privacy changes effectively obfuscated privacy settings, while encouraging users to pump even more data into Facebook _{(more ↓)}. Facebook's reaction to privacy concerns has been a long-term PR strategy. The announced incremental progress toward a solution, which are out just minor feature additions that don't address any of the real issues.

Zuckerberg’s challenges to conventional thinking about online privacy have become so predictable, it’s starting to resemble Moore’s Law.

Fred Vogelstein (via Wired)

It's sneaky and underhanded and leaves a slimy feeling, but if us users are too stupid to appreciate that writing could easily become evidence, or too appreciative of Facebook's amazing and free features to care about the esoteric privacy issues, or smart enough to granularly control all our content we'll stick with Facebook until something better comes along.

Facebook has two problems: privacy concerns leading to a lack of trust, and product development (what to do with all the user data they're collecting). It's the lack of product innovation that is Facebook's huge problem. Despite all hype about F8, and the ensuing privacy backlash, we all missed the greater story: there's nothing new.

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Jay Rosen might be a self-proclaimed introvert, but he had my rapt attention as I watched the TEDx talk he gave last month. Listening to the speech, which has just been posted to YouTube, Professor Rosen builds a picture of crowdsourcing that is so close to complete you can taste the open internet goodness. The 18 minutes are packed with all the clues necessary to create a perfect crowdsourcing strategy.

Prof. Rosen doesn't actually give a bulleted list, but a collection of best practices seems to emerge from his examples. The underlying message, is that crowdsourcing is just a method of data collection. Expect results to be data, not an answer to your original problem.

Here's my crack at sorting the speech into a coherent checklist:

Crowdsourcing Checklist Inspired by Jay Rosen

1. Open your data. If the data needs to be collected, expect to open source it as it's gathered.
2. A community must have a common problem. The community doesn't have to be geographic, but it helps.
3. Divide the problem into small, well defined, tasks that can be filled out on a form and done in minutes.
4. Publicize. Use an established platform to ask for help, and keep asking.
5. Have a timeline. Tweak as the presentation as necessary to meet the goal.
6. Continuously coalesce the data. The result is data. It needs to be compiled into a human-readable format. This should be an ongoing and public process to let the community know how close they are to reaching the goal.

Those are the lessons I gleaned from Prof Rosen's talk. I plan on seeing how they fair against, projects like today's SETI announcement that they would release their data to the public. It seems that their brute-force approach of creating one of the world's largest super computers didn't work out. They're hoping that open sourcing the problem of literally finding signal in noise will find the extraterrestrial life for them.

SETI was originally following the checklist pretty well (they didn't have a clear timeline, but it's a little hard to blame them for that). It didn't work out for them, we'll see if this new approach – which seems to ignore the list

– is any more successful.

For all those asking, the answer is yes. I am willing to be the secretary of the Jay Rosen Fan Club. ;)

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.

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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.

James Surowieckis 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

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

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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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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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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• 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! :)

The print layout is clearly, superior. It’s far easier to read, offers a summary of what the article is at an eye’s glance.

• Multiple Pages The online version requires the user to click to a second page to read the whole article. Yet, the print version fits handily on one page. WHY!? There is no newshole online! Stop making it difficult for us to get to the end of the article!
• Ads Admittedly, the print version shares a spread with a full page ad, but the content remains ad free. The online version feels cramped. There are two, small, intrusive ads, that serve to distract from the content.
• Styling is Gone This is a great example of why shovelware is bad for design. The print version nicely separates out questions, credits, and answers with font styles. The online version? Nothing. Someone just copy-pasted the content out of a text document. It’s much harder to read than the article, let alone tell that it’s a Q&A.
• The Sidebar is Distracting Even if Google is my homepage, there is far too much content presented to draw me in. The sidebar is full of irrelevant stuff that distracts me from the article. The clean, minimalistic design in print is far more eye-catching.

The Takeaway

• **Use subheads **Give the reader entry points. Especially online where people are used to reeading short blurbs of text are are prone to skimming as they scroll.
• Don’t forget the rule about one piece of dominant artwork It's amazing how truly good design never changes. Presenting one place for the eye to center on that sums up the content is a design trait that goes to the way we think – regardless of the medium.
• Leave some whitespace Clutter on the page makes your content hard to read. Just because your CMS allows you to dump in your content and move on, it doesn't mean you should. Giving this article the same amount of design time in both print and online would have helped a lot. I'd bet that the amount of design time for the web could be much less.

You’ve got to be kidding me. I had hope. I’ve been to the new Times newsroom, I’ve seen your awesome web infographics, I’ve talked with your developers, I’ve watched videos of your futurism department. There are many, many, smart people working for you. When I asked one of your employees, why he had given up a well-paying job to come work for you he told me “…when the Times calls, you answer.” I was emboldened when I read your byline from Iran. You, a manager, reported from the heart of what continues to be the world’s biggest story. You sir, are in control of one of the finest journalism producing institutions in the world. Yet, people like you are pissing it away. I was heart broken when I heard that the New York Times, which I have a deep respect and love for signed it’s intent-to-file-chapter-11 forms.

Nonetheless, I have a deep appreciation for experimentation, and I hope that your endeavors will teach the rest of us a thing or two about how to make money on the web.

Then, I read a Q&A that you did in TIME magazine. Even though the copy had to fit on one page, and your answers are brief, **I’ve never seen a journalist sound as much like a politician as you did in that article. **(And I use the word 'politician' that in the out-of-touch, slimy, refusing-to-be-held-accountable sort of way.)

Apologize for your mistakes. Transparency is all it’s cracked up to be.

You admitted that journalists in this country had failed as the Fourth Estate. The flat-out bad reporting when ex-President Bush took this country to war against Iraq was in-excusable. The argument for war was based on lies. To this day, the media hasn’t made a resounding statement saying as much.

You didn’t apologize. You blamed us, the people, for creating “conventional wisdom” for you to ‘float along’ with. If you want us to trust you, we’ve got to have an honest relationship! Tell us when you get something wrong. We’ll be mad, but we’ll trust you more because you came clean.

The smell of ink doesn’t justify its cost.

You said that print still has “a lot of life left in it.” I’m not sure if that was the diplomatic answer but I think most of us would have been more impressed to hear that you were actively looking for ways to move your operation digital; that print was on its way out as the foundation of your business.

Make a commitment to doing journalism online because the myth that, “the best of online journalism is rooted in mainstream media,” won’t last long. I’m not sure what you define as “mainstream,” but you ought to consider re-evaluating your premise. The MSM isn’t the only group of people capable of doing journalism.

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Turns out having a side project can lead to some really good work too. Just ask Google about their 20% rule.

After a long time of not following this sage advice, I am now fortunate enough to announce two.

The Vancouver Project

A good friend of mine, Andrew Burton, and I have been talking for a couple of months about the rise of DSLRs with video capability and what it the implications for sports photographers.

Andrew had the foresight to see that this new technology would come to head in the very near future – namely the coming winter Olympics in Vancouver. Exploring thought, we also realized that this Olympics would be the first since the rise of the real-time web, live video broadcasting from cell phones, Google Wave, and, and, and.

Our realization lead to a plan of action which we're calling The Vancouver Project. Stop by and check us out.

Shameless plug: if you're in a position to help by spreading the word to the right people we'd love to hear from you.

Linked Photographer

In other news, I'm writing a book.

That is a very weird sentence for me to write. I write posts, tweets, cutlines… not books. But, apparently, that's happening :)

An excellent friend of mine, and phenomenal fashion photographer, Lindsay Adler, approached a few months ago saying that she was looking into writing a book, would I be interested in co-authoring?

Today, I signed the contract. We'll be writing a book that's got the tentative title Linked Photographer. It will be part treaties, part howto, and part reference on how photographers can use social media for business. It's a bit more than a for-dummies book, but

We'll be launching linkedphotog.com soon, so stay tuned!

I'm only looking at homepages. Critiquing a whole site is a lot of work. I'll do it someone wants to pay me though :]

After leading a webinar for CoPress on homepage design, I've done a lot of research into mainstream homepages – what works and what doesn't. For the second go at this, let's look at Google News.

Read more…

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?

Read more…

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 :]

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.

Which lead me to the following idea – newspapers are very good at interviewing people. Further, their brand recognition can get them access to folks that the typical blogger doesn’t have access to. Interviews of industry leaders talking about things they don’t typically present in public is certainly premium content that people would be willing to pay for – especially if they can write it off as a business expense.

What a great application of freemium to newspaper online content. Offer a shorter video like the one above for free, and then charge a monthly rate if people want live access.

Of course, there’s a major problem. People are already doing this and providing the content for free. This Week in Startups (TWiST), started just a few weeks ago by Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.com . The show concept is very cool: he uses ustream to livestream an hour long interview with founders and CEOs of interesting startups. He uses a Twitter hashtag as a backchannel to the whole show, allowing people to converse and ask questions. Best of all, this is free.

If Calacanis, who is undoubtedly a busy man, can do this, for free. There must be countless other examples of the same. Just check the iTunes Podcast directory for more.

Mark another lost opportunity for newspapers.

My job description for the summer:

Assist with editorial (articles and multimedia), community and marketing projects, and help develop our nonprofit social news network because NewsTrust wants to expand the quantity and quality of users on the site so that the site can become the community platform to promote quality journalism and increase media literacy.

I'm looking forward to starting in June!

• The design is nice and clean with a solid red motif, but the widgets are sorta hard to tell apart, they don’t really have a bottom.
• I know that Newsweek is a partner of MSNBC, but promoting that connection so heavily may not be so smart. MSNBC should get equal billing (see: Slate and WaPo), or be totally integrated.
• The choice to push the blogs so heavily is interesting (They have a widget and a nav bar). Not bad, just interesting. I’m curious to know if that works out.
• Serious Fun is all kinds of UI hell. The side arrows to mean neutral is just down right confusing , and it’s got very prominent placement on the F pattern of user reading. I’m all down for turning polls into something more of a game, but rethink the UI here.
• Props for having links to other newsorgs. That’s a valuable service that Newsweek is developing. The fact that you get to the other site through a frame is, again, interesting. Cheers to experimentation.

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Taking a step back, a service that I can find for free elsewhere is not one I’m likely to pay for, and I’m willing to sacrifice timeliness to save money.

This will be the a huge problem for newsorgs who want to go the paid content route.

Actually, the phrase Paid Content _is flawed._ It presumes that you’re paying for a _product_. Paying customers of the WSJ, aren’t really paying for the content, they pay for access to that content. You aren’t buying a product, you’re buying a service.

Let’s call Paid Content what it really is: Paid Access.

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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.

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I don't know if I'm ready to sign their death sentence yet, they do seem to have some smart people working for 'em (I look to the New Model for News study and their iPhone app). Yet, it's painfully obvious (after the youtube fiasco) that the AP is a classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing. These are my links for April 14th through April 18th:

The AP is outdated and increasingly irrelevant; so are Printies

https://vimeo.com/3827487

AP thinking of future: http://www.ap.org/newmodel.pdf - Interesting 'atomization of news' but still top-down publishing model.

GregElin (@GregElin) March 23, 2009

Daily Kos: State of the Nation: Newspapers make up 20% of the sources for The Daily Kos, but blogs make up near 13%, the second most. The AP? Less than 1%.

“On the other hand, I will be gleeful when the AP goes out of business. I’m actually shocked at how little we depend on those jerks.”

Daily Kos: State of the Nation

• Hanging Tough: Financial Page: The New Yorker: This is the mindset the media industry needs to have: take risks, experiment. Either you’re going to fail, or come out on top. Non-risk isn’t gonna make you succeed.
• Why top-down syndication is broken: This is it: the newswire isn’t going to be top down, but bottom up. We’re crowdsourcing news, that means you can’t control abundancy. Take that AP.
• Garca Interactive: How ESPN Chicago sticks another nail in the newspaper coffin 26 and what to do about it: Common sense on what to do about saving your niche before someone scoops it up from under you. My favorite: fire the management. They’ve failed, bring someone new in.
• Journalism Online Just in case you were wondering what a plan for failure looks like…

• A strategy is a product of a big vision of the market and where it’s going. It’s about abandoning some markets to concentrate on others. Newspaper companies don’t have a strategy. Newspaper companies have tactics, things they do to respond to other people’s strategies. Until newspapers get a strategy of their own that helps them decide what to do and what not to do, they are doomed to see all the high-potential market strategies owned by everyone else. Which leaves newspaper companies to grumble about unfair everything is and not much more.

  García Interactive: How ESPN Chicago sticks another nail in the newspaper coffin … and what to do about it

• Let me be the first to tell you that saying you aim to be a “world-class platform-neutral news information provider” just tells me you haven’t got a clue about the future, are too scared to make a guess and are hoping someone else will get it right so you can copy them.”

  García Interactive: How ESPN Chicago sticks another nail in the newspaper coffin … and what to do about it

• Instead of feeling diminished by the Huff Post's excerpts, more publications might want to pre-empt the site by serving distilled versions of their own articles. That's right: Even the Post and the Times and the Journal can learn something about how to serve readers from the Huffington Post.

  Hey, journalists! Stop getting all huffy about the Huffington Post's "lifting" of stories. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine

Numbers

• Measuring user engagement: Lessons from BusinessWeek: It’s a good breakdown of how to measure user engagement on a story. This is a valuable metric, that we really need.

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Further, regardless of either of our opinion on print, the iPhone is a different medium as Mr. Murray points out. It's not a blackberry, but it's certainly not print! With constant web access and push notifications coming in full force with iPhone OS 3.0, why limit your app to the 'you're done' feeling?

Instead, recognize that a cell phone, and an iPhone in particular is a uniquely customizable experience. Especially for a paper like the WSJ, which is trying to follow the freemium model, that want for customization is something that can be capitalized on.

Allow users to select what kind of business news they want to receive, maybe even allow them to pick stocks to have news alerts on. Heck, you could even micro-charge for that feature, 15 cents for every company you track, 3 bucks for each industry. Then, deliver them the news on that particular topic, instantly. Use push, use the notification system of the phone to alert them of the most important stuff.

Utilizing the iPhone medium the way it's intended to be used (it is opinionated design after all) is really the only way to have good odds at a successful app. Mobile is and is increasingly a huge deal for the media industry. It would be great to see someone get it right.

Maybe, just maybe, the existing model for generating, distributing and monetizing content could benefit from a Ctrl-Alt-Delete reboot.

Can the Statusphere Save Journalism?

It's been two weeks since my last one of these, which is in part due to laziness, and in part due to my wanting to get a good list going on a contentious topic: Generation Y needs to take over the media.

I'm increasingly convinced that the 'old media' model is broken largely because the old folks just don't get it. Not to say that there aren't people in 30s-70s who don't get 'it,' just that there are too few, too few in a position of power, and too few who get 'it' enough.

These are my links for March 29th through April 13th:

"You blew it"

• 'Star Tribune' Withholds Select Print Content From Web: Talk about Baby Boomers not getting “it.”

• Print is still king: Only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online: There's a lot of fuzzy math done here, and reliance on numbers that may or may not be accurate. (readership is 2+ per copy!?) (avg. person reads 24 pages/day in print!?) Maybe I'm too genY, but I just don't see how this is possible.

• CIRCLE - A nonpartisan research center studying youth civic engagement and civic education. College Students Talk Politics: It's a valid point: GenY might not really pay attention to news b/c they feel like it's not relevant to them. It's largely just talking heads yelling at each other. Argues against Infotainment and for the masses being smart.

• Streisand effect: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”

• "NCAA: Greet the 21st century" : The Editor's Log : Blogs : News-Record.com : Greensboro, North Carolina: NCAA is trying to prohibit people from expressing opinions on Facebook!? They need to get over themselves.

  https://blip.tv/play/gshV99lNAg.x?p=1

• 1. Solve journalism's data problem. 2. Kill the AP. 3. Invest in the next market. BuzzMachine: Jarvis calls for the disbanding of the AP. In light of how backwards they have been, I’m for it.

• NYTimes-turned-NPR Exec: "Not Very Bullish on People Paying for News Content" - mediabistro.com: WebNewser: CEO of NPR in the news for the second time this week with details on how Times Select was a failure despite making 10 million/year.

• The speech the NAA should hear BuzzMachine: I love a good rant, and Jarvis delivers. I think I’m still hoping he’s wrong – that newspapers still can be re-tooled to work online, but I fear he’s right.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TlOVH2TJ34

• Google's Love For Newspapers & How Little They Appreciate It: A good, old fashion, smack-down of the old fashion old media. “Robert, I’ve been creating original content on the internet for about 12 years longer than you’ve been editor of the WSJ. Shut up. Seriously, shut up. To say something like that simply indicates you really do not understand that all blogs are not echo chambers. I mean echo chamber? Sorry, that’s the mainstream media, too.”

• Google a 'Tapeworm:' WSJ Exec: Here’s more of the ‘old media’ mind-fuck.

Read more…

I’m supportive of the idea, but just don’t think that the DO has the tech talent to really pull off the interactive graphics and code work required … yet.

More importantly though, was my fear that the proposed budget didn’t follow the ‘do what you do best, link to the rest’ rule. So much of the content was general, and not even timely. I’ll share my the gist of my response to the budget below in the hopes that it might give some guidance to college media.

The A1 main story would be about summer jobs/internships in this economy. What students are doing since many places (seem) to not be hiring, any odd jobs, prospects for the future so its newsy/feature. Ideally, we would like a pull-out where each part (decibel, splice, spice rack, tech, health) would be its own section, where it would get into text to what it was.

Use Facebook to generate data for you. You can do a series of searches on Facebook for Syracuse students by major, and find what they’ll be doing this summer. I presume many folks will update their profiles to have this data very shortly, if not already.

The more I think about it, the more I realize you probably don't need to have someone who can code. Being able to pull data off the API might be faster, but I imagine much of this will require manual work anyway. You can just do a lot of Facebook searches etc, and make the data static. Not quite as cool, but still very useful. It would be a major project, but a real 'new media' clip of sorts – 'specially if you can present it in a cool way online.

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D.O. Palooza is a conference put on by The Daily Orange of Syracuse University. I'll be livestreaming the event throughout the day.

You can watch here, or on my newly launched Mogulus Channel.

…he made some damn good points about the subscription model. b2c already is doing ok (campfire, github, etc.), it's time for consumers to pony up. His bottom line: if facebook decided to charge you $10/month, you'd pay it. No questions asked.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, or know me, or have listened to some of the top minds in this ‘new media’ business, you’ll be pretty easily pick out how totally my brother has drunk the kool-aid of the bass-akwards mind fuck that the ‘old media’ folks try to sell you.

First there was the stone age

Deep breath.

Let’s try to break this down: We are now in the information age. Where once the pinacle of technology was an iron sword, the new tech is information. Our economy is based on the trade of Intellectual Property. Yet paradoxically, the internet has made information practically infinite. Attempting to make money by controlling the amount of information is therefore doomed to fail. Put another way: controlling the scarcity of something that isn't scarce can't work.

History is not a good guide here: The internet is a fundamental shift from anything we’ve experienced before. It’s as revolutionary as the printing press and as radical as the written word.  It’s both asynchronous and instant two-way communication.

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Last week has lead me this generalization: Generation Y fundamentally understands the internet, and therefore the current state of the world, in a way that older generations just never will.

It's a generalization and not a maxim, because as folks like John Bryne, Bryan Murley, and even Steve Jobs remind me that us youngin's aren't the only ones who get it, we're just in the majority. These are my links for March 21st through March 27th:

Generation Y, X, BB…

• The following are excerpts from #editorchat from John Bryne of Business Week. I'm throughly impressed with his insight. It gives me much hope for the older generations.

“There will be many Born to the Web enterprises over the next few years that will teach the mainstream media a thing or two. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE “They think that some day online advertising will offset the print decline and help support a broken print model. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE “Online readers also earn more than print readers and are more likely to be female. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE “Of our total audience, about 38% are online only; 31% magazine only & 31% are both online and print. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE “There’s overlap in our print and online readers3 but generally our online users are 10 years younger and more highly educated. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE

• On the other hand, the following is a tweet sent by a Syracuse University student during a lecture by Ryan Sholin on 'new media.'

“@ryansholin I’d prefer that we have fewer citizen journalists. You don’t see me trying to be a citizen software engineer or citizen waiter.”- Twitter / benjgc

Put this up there as Generation Y not “getting it” *

[10 Ways To Reinvent Your Newsroom Right Now](http://www.slideshare.net/sjcobrien/10-ways-to-reinvent-your-newsroom-right-now) from **[sjcobrien](http://www.slideshare.net/sjcobrien)**

This is a great presentation. Details some really simple and some more complex things that you could start doing today if you got your newsroom excited about them.

• 2020 vision: What's next for news: A fantastic bit of futurism on the journalism business. • Industry will shrink/re-make itself • The semantic web plays a huge role and datamining becomes key • Collaboration among local news sites for ads and info • New business models like endowments, non-profit, etc • copyright law needs a re-think • The idealist unbiased journalist dies, starts reporting for interest groups
• Newspaper ownership and the fourth generation syndrome | yelvington.com: Steve argues that the current generation of newspaper owners are more interested in spending money than their own business.

“When I got my first computer back in 1984 or 1985, it was a Mac and there was this program called Hypercard by Bill Atkinson. In a very basic way, Hypercard teaches you the basics of how computers [and software development on them] work.” Being who I am, this obviously struck a chord. I wondered if he has hit upon a simple truth about the evolution of computers… and their users. Early on, the software and tools that were available to users were more about working with the capabilities of the machine than what you could get done with it. That lead to every computer user innately understanding the architecture of the machine. Of course, it also lead to scaring many people off, but for those that stuck around, to this day we all have a very true understanding of the what, why and — most importantly — how a computer can (and can’t!) do the things it does.”- At SXSW Michael Penn Talks iTunes, Film, Music, and Hypercard! - The Mac Observer

• Newspaper Execs: Still Sleepless in Seattle - ClickZ: Vin speaks from personal experience about the staff and history of the Seattle PI. In Vin’s opinion, the staff is top notch, but the Hearst Corp. has shackled them.

Journalism Business Models

• Nonprofit journalism: It's in the numbers: Presents numbers dating back to 2006 on the average number of bylines, pages, and sections in the local paper. It’s not really good news.
• Md. Senator Proposes Nonprofit Status For Newspapers - Baltimore News Story - WBAL Baltimore: Current rules don’t allow print media to report on political issues (apparently). A senator has stepped forward and suggested that we allow them to do so.
• A scenario for news BuzzMachine: Think of this one more like a “Jarvis Manifesto”
• “The most profitable newspapers have tended to be monopoly markets with circulation of 20,000 to 100,000 readers. These are not sexy papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which have historically have significantly low margins.”- One Banker’s Plan to Save the Newspaper Industry - Deal Journal - WSJ
• Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet: Controversial post by a UPenn Prof. He refers to his own research on how people interact with ads. Most interesting: the break downs of what and how you can sell online.

“The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed.”- Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet

• A fantastic quote from rev2oh

“The wonder of the web is that it gives readers more and more control every day over what information they consume. Fighting against that trend is futile. Trying to improve the banner ad is like trying to motorize a horse.”_- _RevenueTwoPointZero » Advertising on iPhone

Just plain nifty/WTF?

• The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine gets a new data center: Apparently the entire internet can fit into a shipping containter. 4.5 petabytes, 1TB RAM, and 63 servers.
• The 13 Most Essential Plugins for WordPress - Nettuts+: Totally fantastic list.
• What Happened to the Land of the Free?: Very long, very detailed piece arguing that the government has become too powerful. Well researched, well opined.
• BBC NEWS | Americas | US high school 'held cage fights': WTF!? A Dallas school was holding cage fighting matches, with students!?
• Goodbye Google | stopdesign: Google’s top designer quits ostensibly because Google doesn’t understand good design. Here’s the thing: they’re still successful. They don’t have Microsoft levels of shitty design, so what’s the…

For the Photogs in the house…

The rev2oh team came up with a really solid plan for how newspaper platforms can redo their classifieds sales online. I was really please to see them include aggregating craigslist as one of the goals. After all, why should newsorgs try to create a new social network when a perfectly good one already exists?

The one concern I had when reading their plan was that the premium content is very much a micro-payment model. This does work, (see: ebay), but it's not very user friendly.

In part, this response is applying Jeff Jarvis’ question: “what would Google do?” Or, more appropriately, “What would Apple do?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfcWFvkcHVI

Apple is the master of simplifying their offerings. You can’t buy options for an iphone to get a brighter screen, bluetooth, extra data every month, and a fingerprint-proof backing. That many options is confusing. iPhone comes in two versions that differ in just one way: memory. A customer only has one decision to make, and that simplifies their experience.

And that, after all, is what this entire proposal hinges on: a better user experience.

Read more…

These are my links for March 8th through March 20th:

• Joel Kramer: Lessons I've learned after a year running MinnPost Nieman Journalism Lab: Great look at how the MinnPost works by its founder, Joel Kramer.

  • Short form content monetizes better than long form
  • Uncut video is much less expensive than docu and popular
  • Have funding for a few years before you start
  • Donations will be just as important as advertising

• Social Weather Mapping | smalltalk: Great proof of concept: datamine twitter to show the current weather conditions across the country.

• Nick Bilton Keynote O’Reilly Tools of Change 2009 | Metaprinter

  https://blip.tv/play/AfSMOAI.html?p=1

• There are stages people go through when they’re introduced to a subject:

  1. Rejection as irrelevant (too much change)
  2. Knowing nothing, and admitting it
  3. Know just enough to hurt themselves
  4. Knowing that you know nothing
  5. Knowledgeable, enough to get by
  6. Respected authority
  7. Master, even the experts defer to you

  

• 

  There's always time to launch your dream - (37signals): A great call for, “don’t sacrifice your education for the sake of school.”

• Printed Matters Five ideas for display ads: 5 crazy and good ideas for how to change online ads.

• InDenverTimes Intro

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToTtCFYlFbE

• RevenueTwoPointZero Improving online display advertising: A summary of how online ads are broken and two suggestions on how to fix it: • Limit to one ad a page. Make it a dominant element again • Make homepages on news websites more like the rest of the web…

  

• “Anyone who runs a newspaper should be watching this experiment under a microscope. Someone should even go so far as to obtain copies of the last month of Seattle PI in print and call up every display advertiser and ask them what they plan to do.”

• The Great Seattle Advertising Experiment: What Will Happen to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Print Advertising Dollars? - Publishing 2.0

• Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Clay Shirky: Cheers to Clay Shirky, for so eloquently stating what we’ve all be thinking.

• Telecommuting can replace newsrooms | The Journalism Iconoclast: A strong argument to replace the newsroom with telecommuters. It saves money and increases efficiency.

• #FollowFriday: The Anatomy of a Twitter Trend: Look at how twitter trends start. Good research implications.

• MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

  The new short film by Blu an ambiguous animation painted on public walls. Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche) http://www.blublu.org/

Steven has a good, albeit simplistic break down of how this new paradigm is working. I'm sure I agree with the flow of the information News → Commentary → Curation → Distribution. Seems to me that you'd have to distribute before you can get comments back, and that you'd need to curate the commentary… Forget it, the the chart is simplistic.

Steven does have the right context for this though:

Now there’s one objection to this ecosystems view of news that I take very seriously. It is far more complicated to navigate this new world than it is to sit down with your morning paper. There are vastly more options to choose from, and of course, there’s more noise now. For every Ars Technica there are a dozen lame rumor sites that just make things up with no accountability whatsoever.

Steven Johnson

I agree whole heartily with his point and I like the broad strokes of his chart. But, I suggest that this diagram far too simple to describe the new paradigm.

As Steven says, “The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.” What his model is missing is the intricacies of linking, how data will be distributed to not only the customer, but among all of those gathering and generating news.

Hypothesizing on the new newsflow

Yea… not as easy to understand right? I’ve got arrows going all over the place, and there’s not clear rhyme or reason to the way information flows. My apologies, these relationships are chaotic and often have many nodes. Let me make the key points:

Data is key. As Tim Berners Lee has predicted, the future of the web is “linked data.” This is is something that Steven addresses, but only briefly. As the semantic web becomes reality, displaying and accessing data will become the important role for journalism to fill.

Read more…

I'll go ahead and quote portions of their email in two quotes. I'll break in between for analysis.

Here’s what we’re interested in:

• Cross post opinion and campus reaction/color during the NCAA Tournament in the ESPN profile space (description below). Could start with Final 4 picks.
• Send an e-mail to me and _removed for privacy _once you’ve posted
• Include URL of the post on ESPN.com with brief description
• Include any related URLs

Break: If you’ve read that carefully, you’ll see that ESPN is trying to crowdsource their reporting. They’re asking college journalists to write about the topic they know best, their campus, then package the content with a neat little bow, and send it off to them to be used…

Here’s what I can do with your content:

• Posts considered for the P1 box below the poll on the front of ESPN.com
• Best posts included in campus roundup file
• Best posts shared with our college basketball editor

…no where important.

Read more…

Craigslist is an established social network. Trying to take them on is a bit like saying you want to build a better facebook. The idea that you can build a website, no matter how much better that doesn't use the old social paradigm is ludicrous. No one is going to use both sites, and no one is going to move to a new site that doesn't have all their friends on it. Same applies to a new craigslist.

But, in looking at newspapers as a platform, a portal to their community, there becomes an obvious way to utilize Craigslist to the mutual benefit of the customer, newsorg, and Craigslist.

Read more…

Today, buried in a press event to announce some new mobile apps, they announced that they would start experimenting with paid content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjTIl_YtG90

My gut reaction was very similar to Zach Wise

WTF! Goodbye Time.com…

@zlwise

But, then I watched the video, and regained some hope for my favorite online publisher. They're not just going to enact a paywall. They've given them selves 8 months to "experiment" with making portions of their sites paid content.

Read more…

1. I'll have limited Internet access, so don't expect a my LINKS post to be very long/exist next week.
2. I'll have limited Internet access and don't plan on being able to get any work done. At all. Not too sure how I feel about that.
3. My Thursday resolution to try out TweetDeck for twitter is gonna have to wait a while.

On a similar note, if any of you have any requests on how to better lay this post out or better formating or etc… lemme know.

Here we go: these are my links for February 26th through March 5th:

OMG! (and other news that broke this week)

• EMERALD NEWS STAFF STRIKES - News: The Daily Emerald newsroom unanimously walks out until they’re satisfied their board will not be putting them in a position where they can be censored.

• What to do if your startup is about fail (or "Don't Stop Believing") The Jason Calacanis Weblog: It’s a how-to guide on how to save your VC funded business. Or how to close it down. Told by one who knows, this is a must read before you get into the startup world.

Journalism, Examples of

• Interactive | Taubman Museum of Art: Great example of what an infographic can be. They clearly put a lot of work into this.
• The Geography of a Recession - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com: Fantastic infographic from the New York Times on the unemployment rate nation wide.

https://vimeo.com/3390739 Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Nifty Online Things

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-ntLGOyHw4 Apple CEO Steve Jobs is well known for his electrifying presentations. Communications coach Carmine Gallo discusses the various techniques…

• 15 Useful Twitter Hacks and Plug-Ins For WordPress | How-To | Smashing Magazine: Some nifty hacks for wordpress and twitter.
• Prez Loves to Work the Phone - Politics news | Newser: Feels good to have a president that is both active and actively using basic technology.
• 85+ Tools & Resources for Freelancers and Web Workers: It’s an okay list that primarily relates to time tracking and billing
• Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019 (montage + video) - istartedsomething
• Google Tasks, a Standalone App: Looks like Google may be introducing a task manager soon. Here’s hoping it allows for some group collaboration!

Online Journalism

• Recession? Local news sites are hanging tough: Great look at some/most? of the successful hyperlocal news startups.
• Online video storytelling and trends : Online Journalism

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/1049512

• Hulu Traffic Still Up Big After Super Bowl Spike: Hulu saw a huge spike in traffic after the Superbowl (perhaps because of their ad?), and has seen that traffic stay high – roughly 33% higher. Proves that good advertising not only works, but online,…
• Printed Matters Why SEO is still job #1 at news sites: On Google is your landing page and why your newspapers site needs to be a platform.
• Chicago Reader Blogs: Chicagoland: A long analysis of a Chicago townhall on what todo with the Trib. Points I don’t agree with: aggregation is bad, journalists aren’t to blame. Points I like: journos should be able to brand themselves…

Journalism Business Models

• Newspapers: From No Profit to Non-Profits?: A wrap of how how the endowment business model may come into play.
• Business Models of News :: Innovation in Software :: The Vagueware Blog: Good summary of the current state/failure of newspaper advertising, including a quick macro list of how to fix it.
• Five ways newspapers can improve online ads | Knight Digital Media Center Weblog: I’ve actually mentioned all these ideas before, but this is a really handy list of ways for newspapers to make money. – That they’re not doing!
• Information Wants to Be Expensive - WSJ.com: Basically: information will be paid for if it’s unique and high-value. There’s gotta be a way to leverage this idea for freemium.
• The size of social networks | Primates on Facebook | The Economist: Apparently, Dunbar’s number holds true online as well as physically.
• Poynter Online - NewsPay: Knight CEO Bill Mitchel says: • Make way for a new establishment. • Think of media as a path to activism. • Imagine a smaller world. • Get creative with economic models for sustaining news.
• The ethical journalist's guide to selling ads on a website: Part one: Ethics and basic introduction for journalists trying to advertise online.

• Yahoo! Previews Powerful News Advertising Platform: Seems like a good idea to me. Yahoo provides the ad distribution network and newspapers provide the ad selling power.
• Yahoo Teams With Newspapers to Sell Ads - NYTimes.com: The Yahoo - Newspaper ad collaboration deal seems to be working out well.
• Pew Research Center: Newspapers Face a Challenging Calculus: Apparently, newspaper readership has declined in the last 2 years both online and in print. Though, this number might not include aggregators ∴ who really knows.
• Content Bridges: Paid Newsday? Parsing What It Means...and Those 4.5 Minutes: The reason why Newsday paid content will fail is not because of low engagement, but because the newsroom doesn’t do online right to begin with!

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

• 5 Common photo slideshow mistakes :: 10,000 Words :: multimedia, online journalism news and reviews: 5 things to avoid when making an audio slideshow. Rather insightful.

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 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)](http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=a4e2aafc-cc92-4e79-90d1-db3946a6d119)_

_[](http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=a4e2aafc-cc92-4e79-90d1-db3946a6d119)“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)

• Wasting Ink, Beating a Dead Horse - ClickZ: “If the newspaper industry wants to survive, it must begin mass-customizing its products on- and offline, rather than trying to find ways to get people to pay for the obsolete generic package. The…
• Why the debate about financing journalism misses the point. - By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine: A call for for newspapers to embark on Bill Gates’ “creative capitalism” — a business that acts in the public good. In the case of newspapers this would likely involve an hybrid of endowments and…
• Content Bridges: Paid Newsday Site? What's 4 1/2 Minutes Worth to You? Newsday is now charging for content. Is that such a good idea considering the fact that they have the lowest level of engagement of the top 30 newspaper sites?

Journalism

• JPROF: A superior user experience: A great quote out of the recent manifesto written by Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg on the future of GOOG. The quote suggests that readers need a better UX out of newspaper websites.
• How college media uses Twitter - Innovation in College Media: CICM has a good study on how college media is using Twitter. Conclusion: either you use it wrong, or (a select few) use it very well.
• Journalism is the business of building communities - so newsrooms must hire from within those communities: A call to use local resources for local reporting. Makes sense, you have to use people who know your niche market.
• Newspapers Will Never Get IT Right David Strom's Web Informant: Here’s the meet of the post: Examine any aspect of any newspaper’s online edition and you will find it botched. Fixed table widths that assume everyone has a 26-inch monitor set to 1024 x 768…
• “Throughout the 20th century, newspaper-reader surveys showed the average reader read only four to six stories per edition, no matter how many stories were in the paper. That hasn’t changed, and it’s worse with newspaper sites. Data from Nielsen Online and comScore Media Metrix show the average newspaper-site user visits only two to eight times per month, reads less than 25 stories all month long, and spends less time on site all month than the average print-edition reader spends on a single edition. The Web isn’t the newspaper industry’s savior.” _- _Wasting Ink, Beating a Dead Horse - ClickZ
• “The 400-year-old era of traditional newspapers is over. They are obsolete.”- Wasting Ink, Beating a Dead Horse - ClickZ

Offbeat

• Facebook et al risk 'infantilising' the human mind | Media | guardian.co.uk: A British psychologist testified before the House of Lords that short form communication (like twitter) leads to ADD.

• Safari 4 Hidden Preferences - Random Genius: Restore the new Safari UI back to the old one.

• Microsoft has to hit up laid-off workers for money - BusinessWeek: Well, that’s just embarrassing :)

• ““Marijuana already plays a huge role in the California economy,” said Stephen Gutwillig, the group’s California state director. “It’s a revenue opportunity we literally can’t afford to ignore any longer.””- Bill would legalize, tax marijuana - Sacramento News - Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee

This is something the news tribe did not understand went it first went online around 1996. It saw the Web as a good way to re-purpose its content from the old platform; and while the Web can do that, the idea of re-purposing news content had a huge intellectual cost. It did not help the tribe understand the ground on which it had to rebuild. It permitted the press to delay the date of migration.

Migration Point for the Press Tribe, Jay Rosen

Newspapers got it all wrong when the went online. Simply shoveling their content from the print product into a template website and saying, “There, we’re online.”

But, they’ve never really been ‘first class citizens’ of the web. Newspapers are still not doing simple things like linking or tagging or using social media. They’re online in that they have a website, but their still using a print mentality to maintain it.

I propose that this is because news organizations still haven’t realized that the internet has changed the definition of a journalist. During this week’s #collegejourn chat I proposed that:

“journalists, at least in the new media sense, are nothing more than experts in a field that have the ability to create mass media based on that expertise.”

Based on this definition, journalists should be viewed as community leaders, people that know a lot about a topic, and therefore are respected enough by the community to inform others. This makes them something of a mixture of a columnist (read: blogger), a reporter (read: blogger), and a content creator (read: photographer/videographer/designer/infographics-maker/databaseminer/developer).

If we extrapolate this out to the newspaper as a whole, the future might very well be an organization that consists of many journalists that can provide mass media to a relevant community.

Newspapers are used to being limited to geographic communities because they were limited by their physical product that never could reach outside that demographic. The Internet gives us a publish button that puts content up for the whole world to instantly see. The word “community” is no longer limited to geography, it can now apply to any niche of information.

The company Gawker Media, has taken advantage of this new definition. They host nearly a dozen websites that cover a specific niche. From tech news to celebrity gossip, each site has it’s own coverage of a particular niche of information. This includes both original content and aggregation. Anything, just so long as their site gives a complete picture of the niche they’re covering.

A Geographic Niche

With that model in mind, let’s get back to newspapers, who are best at covering the geographic niche. There are ways for newspapers to turn their websites into first class web citizens and stop re-purposing of print content, that doesn’t do a good job of serving their community.

Read the rest of the post at CoPress

It’s a service that lets my not only bookmark sites that I like, but index them in a way that makes them eminently searchable for future writing/reference.

However, it’s missing one critical component that we get out of services like digg or reddit or iTunes: a ranking system.

I’m a bit of a freak when it comes to my iTunes library. I can proudly boast that I own 80.4 days of music. That amount of data requires a certain amount of … OCD attention to detail.

Part of my 'attention to detail' is keeping track of what music I actually like. Fortunately, iTunes has a way to do this ranking 1-5 stars — just like the movies!

 

★★★☆☆

When I got back and do research for a blog post, quality is one of the first things that I try to remember about a link in my publish2.

I never bookmark complete trash, but when I’ve got hundreds of links related to advertising (for example), it would be great to have the most important ones popup first.

So, I propose a solution. From now on, I’ll be adding asterisks to my tags in publish2, as a way to star rank the quality of the post on a scale of 1-5. Just like iTunes. Just as easy to do.

I invite you to join me in this endeavor. If we all start doing this, it will become an effective way of raising the best links to the top of the pile.

I've created a Get Satisfaction feature request, please weigh in there.

Journalism Business Models

•  Hulu's Superbowl Ad and the Boxee Fight - O'Reilly Radar: “I’m sure Hulu is totally pissed. They pretty much said just that in a somewhat more stilted way. The real insult, though, is calling the people who made them cut Boxee off “content providers.” They…

• Why I dislike micropayments, don't mind charity, but really have a better idea Network(ed)News: What a fantastically simple idea for a journalism business model: charge for interaction with the content creator. Donate some money to the site, and the chances of your comments etc being responded…

• Walter Isaacson: You've got it all wrong | Musings of an Anonymous Geek: Theodor Nelson writes the equivalent of a very long blog post as a response to Walter Isaacson’s use of his name in his argument for micropayments for news. Essentially, Nelson wants to use a…

Cover via Amazon Interview: Wired's Chris Anderson on the 'free' business model | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com: Chris Anderson, author of Long Tail, discusses the Freemium business model. 

• Tech Tools Day 1: Tomorrow's Journalism and Journalists - The Next Newsroom Project: “Readers have never been willing to support this industry economically,” Fine said. “Her advice for anyone in the news biz was direct: ‘I know that not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur,’ Fine…

• DigiDave | Communication is Key: Journalism Beyond Newspapers - Don't Become Nonprofits - Work for Them: Dave Cohn makes a good point: journalists can market their services toward non-profits who need the press and often can’t get their message out there.

• Forget Micropayments -- Here's a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content: Steve Outing endorses Kachingle, a micro-payment service for websites with one distinct caveat: paying is still optional. The user decides on how much they want to pay for their news, and all the…

• Will paid content work? Two cautionary tales from 2004 Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: Good look at the failures of the Paid Content model: LAT, and the Albuquerque Journal. End with a reminder: just because Editors think that they are entitled to make money from content, it doesn’t…

• Op-Ed Contributor - You Can't Sell News by the Slice - NYTimes.com: A New York Times op-ed on why paid content won’t work. Oh, and that even if it did, the revenue wouldn’t “save newspapers.”

• What does engagement mean for newspapers? - Eat Sleep Publish: A good summary and batch of links on why engagement on sites is important.

• Top 15 of 2008: The leading regional newspaper sites shuffle their ranks Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: The top regional newspapers have seen a significant increase in pageviews.

• lectroid.net Blog Archive Newspapers could actually try online: Really solid advice on how to evolve your print newsroom into a real, online newsorg. Topics include: Staffing, web design, and workflow.

• Reflections of a Newsosaur: How to charge for content. Theoretically.: Alan Mutter jumps on the micropayment bandwagon as the most “logical way” to make money online. He makes the wrong assumption that “Consumers might not like being micro-nickled and nano-dimed for…

Web Journalism

• The Doc Searls Weblog : Saturday, March 24, 2007: Fantastic list of things that newspapers should do on their websites to make them more relevant to users (read: user friendly)

• How an NYT developer built a new way to read the news online: The ‘new’ interface is a great move for the Times. It does distinctly reminds me of http://newser.com and I think corrects one of the major flaws of current online newspaper design: the lack of…

• 

  NYT Article Skimmer: Recreate the Sunday Morning Paper in Your Browser - ReadWriteWeb

Read more…

Lauren’s analysis of the way to overhaul the her journalism program seems to go down the right path. I would take it just a set or two further though and stop the broadcast concentration. I'm looking at:

• writing track: teaches reporting as any old print/newspaper prof would typically teach it, but with a strong emphasis on writing for the web. This naturally includes social networking, blogging, and audio production.
• visual-content track These are are photogs, broadcast people, & designers. Teach a little bit of print design, but go 40-60% with web design. Photogs and video folk ought to know most of what each other does. Photogs may get some studio and photoshop time that the video folk won't and the video people ought to focus a little more on how to produce BJ style stories.
• tech track: We need to be teaching/recruiting coders as journalists. Now that we’re on the web, we need people who are capable of running that infrastructure. We ought to be training people in web site design, database management and display, data-mining, website development, etc

I mostly agree with Lauren’s idea of scrapping the print track, as I’ve said, teaching print design is a bit like teaching someone esperanto. It’s not like print design is going to go away, but it is far less important that teaching web design to those in the journalism field.

Video

I’ll go ahead and cautiously agree with Lauren, video should be taught in some form or another to all the majors. I say again: cautiously.

Newhouse has a the ‘kid in the candy store’ syndrome when it comes to video. Soundslides are taught in beginning writing and photo classes, video/multimedia has become an integral part of nearly every lesson plan. The thinking is, ‘new media’ involves heavy use of multimedia and video, and therefore every student should be indoctrinated into the ways of ‘new media.’

This thinking is just … flawed. Beginning photo students just don’t need to know how to shoot video … it’s advanced skill that just doesn’t need to be taught to beginning students.

Besides, the video that Newhouse emphasizes is short-form, heavily edited video segments that last 1:30. I’m not at all convinced that the ROI is there.

Instead, Newhouse ought to focus on the basics of shooting video (composition, lighting, uploading, etc) for those not in the visual track and _long form video _(10 min) for the visual folk.

Social Media

Every program should heavily emphasis social media. How to leverage it for reporting, maintaining a personal and professional blog, twitter, podcasting, etc…

One nice thing about Newhouse is it is home to a lot of up-to-date, high-end equipment. This

makes the job of learning and reporting much easier, but it’s all for nought if we’re not learning applicable information.

An active blog ought to be viewed in the same light as getting an internship – a requirement.

Old media

Just like the mainstream media industry, journalism academia is run by Baby Boomers and a select few in Generation X. Generally, these folk just don’t ‘get’ social media in the same way that us Generation Y kids do. How can they be expect to teach the value of something that they don’t value?

Read more…

These three heavy-weight entertainment industries have proven that charging for content online leads to … quasi success. Yes, iTunes, Netflix, and Steam have been able to deliver paid content to a mass audience, and they do if far easier than if you try to pirate download the same, but piracy is still rampant.

Make it free, or the pirates will. The TIME article, and others like it, refer to the 'iTunes model' when the talk about micropayments for news. Yet, this analogy is flawed:

• Music, movies, software, and video games are content that has ‘repeat use’ value. News is read once, then mentally file away.
• Music, movies, and video games are entertainment, a luxury good that carries a far different intrinsic value than an essential good like news. Software isn’t a luxury good, but it is a productivity tool that also doesn’t have the intrinsic value that news/information has. Besides, software doesn’t really have the micropayment model either.
• It’s easy to preview content on iTunes, it’s near impossible to provide an accurate preview of information without providing the … information.

I’d be willing to bet that if a news service tries the paid content model people will find someway to get around the pay wall. If they’ve found a way to steal entertainment goods, trust me, they’ll find a way to steal the news.

And that sure doesn’t sound like a Fourth Estate to me: a system where the people have to steal their information!?

Better to let the traditional newsroom die, or run a smaller operation. You can’t tell me that every reporter in a current newsroom actually earns their keep.

If micropayment schemes ever actually gain traction, people will opensource the news. We can mashup twitter, youtube, blogs, and aggregators to get a reasonable approximation of the information that we get now. Granted, it would be much shorter form content. But since we mostly skim the news right now anyway, the user wouldn’t see much lost.

Read more…

Newspaper Business Models

• How to Save Your Newspaper | TIME: Didn’t we already have this debate? Paying for essential information doesn’t work. You can charge a niche audience, (a’la Wall Street Journal) but charging the masses just won’t work. This is the story that initiated the latest debate across the web.
• Death Of Print: How Not to Save Newspapers: A really good argument against the micropayment plan for journalism.

• [Lab Book Club: Jay Hamilton, Chapter 2](http://vimeo.com/3010296) from [Nieman Journalism Lab](http://vimeo.com/niemanlab) on [Vimeo](http://vimeo.com).

  : As newsorgs rely on less and less sustainable business models, they become more and more biased. Ends with a call for the non-profit business model.
• Please pay us for our news - please? Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: Sums up the argument for and against the paid content model and concludes that users never really paid for content anyway, and that newspapers must add some value to the news to be … valued.
• Journalism 2.0 There really are new business models for journalism: A list of some new media orgs that are surviving in today’s economy with off-beat business models.

Read more…

Eight reasons why College Publisher is a problem

1. I'm worried that other universities that produce a product inferior to our own, are so far ahead of us in the online space. This is ass backwards, and cannot be allowed to continue if we expect to keep bragging about the great tradition of the DO. It very well might become the 'once great tradition'
2. College Publisher has ceased development of their next generation of software – CP5. No future growth does not bode well for their continued success. I'd be wary of thinking of College Publisher as a platform that will always be there.
3. Online is both the future and the present reality. Every newsorg needs to exist online in a meaningful way. Many don't get it right, but we blatantly get it wrong.
4. We loose customers because of our poor website design. This directly translates to ad dollars lost. A new site will be much more customer (user) friendly and not only promote on campus readership, but convert new community readers, especially as related to sports.
5. We can make the newsroom more efficient by going to a web-first publishing model.
6. We exist in a 24 hour news cycle, and CP4 doesn't let us operate in that fashion.
7. I'm very much worried that an online only startup will come out of Newhouse and challenge the DO as the prime new provider for Syracuse campus news. The DO has long enjoyed a monopoly… the last thing it needs is competition.
8. Experimentation is key. The worst thing we can do is continue the status quo. We KNOW that won't work. We need to figure out what does now, while we still have money to spend. If you think budgets are tight now, think about how tight they will be at the end of 2009, 2010?

Read more…

Inspired by a small point made by Jeff Jarvis, I left a comment on his blog saying that I thought he had struck gold — a way to supplement ad revenue at local newspapers.

To adapt to the Internet, newspapers have been forced to evolve, some have become experts in ‘new media.’ A term that I hate because, really what is ‘new media?’ When does it stop becoming new, and what will we call the media that comes after it? Is everything just eternally ‘new media?’

The current definition means that a ‘new media’ expert is up-to-speed on blogging, linking, short form video, Facebook, Twitter, other social networks, etc… All of this expertise is a real commodity that many businesses would love to tap into.

Read more…

My battle this week stems from a series of emails exchanged between myself, the IT staff, and the Business Director that originally stemmed from the ad department securing online sponsorship for a weekly print feature: Thirsy Thursday — a beer (mmh… beer) reviewing column.

The effort has devolved into a struggle to get the new IT staff up to speed, launch a new blog for Thirsty Thursday, and even redoing parts of the main website. My suggestions on that front were:

• decisions about web design by non-web designers is usually a poor choice.
• unilateral decisions about the structure of an editorial site by business staff is not a good move
• I'd strongly suggest that many of our design issues are centered around college publisher inadequacies. 

The Way Forward

This whole process lead me to realize that what the DO needs more than anything else, is a planned approach to the Internet, which until this point, has been haphazard at best. We have no plan for forward growth, and that means that we're likely going to continue to be frustrated with each other and with our own efforts. At this point there are plenty of other colleges out there that have easily surpassed our own efforts to both make money online and leverage it as a platform.

I for one, find this to be unacceptable. The Daily Orange has a strong tradition of … everything, and it's rather shameful to see us falling so far behind on technology that is both the present and future of the neworg.

There are already schools that have seen their traditional college newspaper challenged (and in the case of NYU, replaced) by an online only news startup. I do honestly fear that the DO stands to suffer the same fate if things continue at the current pace.

Read more…

https://blip.tv/play/goQz3MtMAg.html?p=1

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.”

Read more…

• Please pay us for our news - please? Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: Sums up the argument for and against the paid content model and concludes that users never really paid for content anyway, and that newspapers must add some value to the news to be … valued.
• Lab Book Club: Jay Hamilton, Chapter 2:As newsorgs rely on less and less sustainable business models, they become more and more biased. Ends with a call for the non-profit business model.
• NYTimes Exposes 2.8 Million Articles in New API - ReadWriteWeb: The New York Times seems to be moving towards establishing itself as a platform of news. Sharing all of it’s content in this matter is a good indicator that they ‘get it’
• On Portfolio Reviews (part 2) (Conscientious): Good advice for getting a photography portfolio reviewed from a variety of people who do it.
• How to Save Your Newspaper | TIME: Didn’t we already have this debate? Paying for essential information doesn’t work. You can charge a niche audience, (a’la Wall Street Journal) but charging the masses just won’t work.

Read more…

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.

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 more…

• A Review of Two Things: One For the Mac and One For iPhone - Shawn Blanc

• Cadbury Dairy Milk - Eyebrow dance - Cadbury Dairy Milk - Eyebrow dance:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0SchmcLXMQ

  http://www.adme.com.br Agency: Fallon, London Executive Creative Director: Richard Flintham Creative Directors: Chris Bovill &…

• Alba to O'Reilly: No, You're a Pinhead! - Gossip news | Newser: Jessica Alba uses a blog and wikipedia to fire back at Bill O’Rielly — props to her for using the Internet to criticize a very non-internet friendly guy

• How Michael Wolff Puts the News in 'Newser': “…journalism is important here, but it certainly isn’t the whole game. It’s a relatively segmented part of what you do when you create a news product.” That combined with the 1.5 million pageviews…

• “DM: Do you think that’s going to be an aspect that may increase readership, with people expecting that they won’t be bombarded with display ads? MW: No, no, we’d love to bombard them. Just looking at the economics, it becomes incredibly front-loaded to build an ad staff. And that’s kind of the advantage of using Google in this regard. You’re going to lose an upside of [revenue], but at this point our traffic is growing very quickly – I think we’re at close to 1.5 million this [November 2008] – but nevertheless, if I bring on an ad-sales staff on that, and I’m not going to recoup for a long time.”- How Michael Wolff Puts the News in ‘Newser’

• The Canary At The New York Times Grows Larger As Internet Advertising Keeps Dropping: If the New York Times has seen stagnant online ad revenue for the last year, things are not looking good for the industry as a whole.

• MediaShift . College Newspapers Finally Hit by Economic Downturn | PBS: Bryan Murley uses some excellent reporting to discuss the current state of revenue streams in college media. The sector is down, but looking to innovate.

• Paul Harris 50 cent rap ft. Sexy Dex and Rudy

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT4xc9F20vU

  Paul Harris 50 cent rap featuring Dexter “sexy dex” Harris jr. and Rudy Sohl

• 10 Reasons why online news sites suck :: 10,000 Words :: multimedia, online journalism news and reviews: Interesting that half the complaints relate to online advertising far more than they relate to the practice of news online.

• The Peoria plan for saving local dailies: Interesting tax option. An L3C can operate as a for-profit, but can receive donations like a 501c3 can.

• iMovie ‘09 Image Stabilization test on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

• “BLAGOJEVICH: Well, let me answer that two ways. First, I can’t comment specifically on that, ‘cause I haven’t heard those tapes. But assuming that’s what it is, if you hear all the tapes, and you hear the whole thing in its context, if I feared that that was something sinister or onerous would I want all those tapes heard?”- Transcript: Rod Blagojevich, one on one - Rachel Maddow show- msnbc.com

• MediaShift . The Big Video Debate: Rough or Slick? | PBS: Argues that Flip quality video is just fine for the web. IMHO: he’s right, the convenience of the flip just lends it to journalism far more than larger equipment.

• The three primary roles your local website should play | yelvington.com

• “Flight 1549, and the Mumbai and Gaza incidents demonstrated how powerful Twitter and citizen reporting has become for breaking news. Why Facebook and other social networks are horribly used by mass media, and the right ways to leverage Facebook and other networks to reach your audience.”- Introducing a Social Media System for News Organizations (Free!) at Media Transparent

• GateHouse exec Kirk Davis: "What do you think, we're stupid? Of course we like linking" Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: “In the spare time I had to follow public sentiment about this case,” Davis said, “you’d see comments like, ‘GateHouse is against linking.’ You’ve got to be kidding me. What do you think, we’re…

• Objectified trailer - Objectified trailer:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9E2D2PaIcI

  A peek at the upcoming design documentary “Objectified”, by Gary Hustwit, the director of “Helvetica”. The trailer features the voices of…

• xkcd - A Webcomic - I’m An Idiot

• The lie of print advertising (followed by good news) BuzzMachine: “Media organizations can and must devise new services for marketers. Perhaps, for example, a local media company should act as an agency for every local business, helping them get good search-engine…

• Traditional Media: Let's Take it Offline: Turning the page on Print Ads: Google will no longer sell print ads. Disappointing, but a good example of ‘do what you do best, link to the rest’ in action.

• Let's talk about the economics of great journalism | Rational rants | ZDNet.com: “Forget about advertising and the like as a means of support.” Goes on to argue for a business model similar to spot.us

• How Twitter makes you a better writer (Scripting News): “Twitter forces you to write concisely, and that makes for crisper, more direct, easier to read copy.”

• Fanboy.com » Blog Archive » Social Media “Experts” are the Cancer of Twitter (and Must Be Stopped)

The whole experience was … weird. I looked up the process online and found that I had to go to my home college to get the correct paperwork. I appeared, and asked for an academic advisor. After 20 min, or so, I was politely escorted into an office of the only advisor available, only to be told she could of no assistance.

I’ve been to academic advisors at least five times in the past, and have had the same encounter. Each time, I’ve been told that I should have seen a ‘recorder’ instead of of an 'advisor.'

A bit frustrated, I asked why the Recorders seemed to have all the answers, and the advisors couldn’t seem to do anything. It seemed to me, that the title 'recorder,' was more administrative, and the advisor was more … advisory. Apparently, I was wrong. Recorders are for “anything to do with paperwork.”

Still rather mystified as to what an academic advisor actually does, I put my name on the list to see a Recorder.

When I sat down, to explain for the second time, that I wanted to take a leave of absence, the Recorder in front of me complained that my recorder (last name beginning with letters: A-G) wasn’t in today. But, she could take care of me.

The Recorder pulled the correct, half-sheet, in-triplicate, form out of the top drawer of her desk, and had me fill out my name, ID number, phone number, and check off the reasons why I was taking the leave. I checked off “personal/family” and “other.”

Her paperwork competed, she told me she'd have to make a copy of the triplicate form, but the phone rang and the Recorder had me wait while she finished the call. I waited a few more minutes, during witch time I grabbed the business card of "my" Recorder.

Once it was copied, I took the triplicate form back, and continued to the next building to turn the form over to the office of the Dean of Student Affairs.

After taking the stairs to the third floow, I handed my form to the secretary, who said that she thought she could get someone to talk to me directly. I patiently had a seat in the lobby, and patiently denied the kind offer for water or coffee from the secretary (administrative assistant?).

I picked up the only magazine that remotely interested me on the side table – Contact Sheet – put together by the on campus, non-profit, photo lab. I had just enough time to flip through it and determine that it was by-and-large graphics of words like “peace” and “love” and in no way resembled a contact sheet of photos, when I heard my name called.

I was politely ushered into the bare-walled, narrow office and offered a seat on a couch flush to the same wall as the woman’s desk. She already had my half-sheet form, and explained that the university liked to conduct a brief interview with students taking a leave. Right away, she found that the form wasn’t signed by my home college. Though not yet exasperated, I slowly explained that I had just been to that office, and that they were the ones that had given my the form. She asked who I had seen at the other office, and I played a guessing game between two similar sounding names that began with ‘M.’

I guessed wrong as it turns out, but all was straightened out after a phone call that consisted more of gossip than enquiring if I had actually been seen by the sole person who could give me the from I had presented to the woman in front of me.

Hanging up the phone, the woman from the office of Student Affairs looked down at the form, noted my check-off reasons for taking a leave, and enquired for more details. I explained that my family had determined that I was better off focusing on my extra-curricular activities for a semester and that I intended to return to school soon.

A few more details, and we shook hands. I walked out of her office with wishes of ‘good luck’ and ‘we hope to see you back.’

I walked out the office with the following train of though:

• That was really, really, easy to do. Granted, I had to go to two offices, and talk with five different people, but that only took an hour. It’s hard to believe that getting out of school, and receiving at $15,000 tuition refund was really that easy.
• The one thing that I kept hearing from each person I talked to was they hoped to see me back. It seems that college students taking a leave of absence is a frequent enough occurrence that the staff has become resigned to it. They're used to it enough that the form has check boxes that read something to the effect of ‘school isn’t right for me,’ or ‘my grades aren’t to my satisfaction.’
• What does this suggest about the education system? Advisors don’t advise, paperwork is paramount, and a students leaving school is far too common.
At no point was I asked not to leave, it wasn’t even a hard process — they just had me fill out paperwork. My ‘exit interview’ was a joke. All they asked me was if I’d be coming back … not that it mattered outside of the box they’d have to check.

Looking back, I’ve never been into college. I recognize that I’ve had senioritise since freshman year…

…of high school. I’ve been saying since then that college was about the experience more than the ‘education.’ It’s not that I haven’t learned anything from class. I have. But, I’ve learned far more from my experience of college, than from sitting in a classroom. I plan to go back to school. I plan to get my degree — even if it’s just so I can get a piece of paper that shows I’m ‘educated.’ This experience though, has caused me to question the value of the degree more than ever.

If an education system is so used to seeing failure, what faith do I put in it? Is a piece of paper worth all the aggravation, and expense to achieve? Could I be better off going to work on topics that fascinate me, that need the help of my generation?

I'm "young man with my whole life" in front of me according to the academic advisor I saw today. Here's hoping she's right.

• Journalism.co.uk :: 'To succeed online student journalists must collaborate outside their own university': Greg Linch gives a good overview of the current state and goals of CoPress
• “Whitney is an accomplished Times veteran whose work I’ve admired over the years. But this memo sums up some of the very reasons why so many believe the mainstream media is doomed to irrelevance.”- ‘The New York Times’ Facebook problem | Coop’s Corner - CNET News
• Journalistopia » Tinkering | Danny Sanchez -
• Barack Obama's inauguration speech ... crafted by 27-year-old in Starbucks | World news | The Guardian: The Guardian (of all newsorgs) has a great profile on Obama’s head — 27 y/o — speech writer.
• UI.Layout Plug-in - Home: jquery plugin that allows for ajax layout of massive proportions.
• Journalists are biggest terrorists: Zardari - PakTribune: “Journalists are the biggest terrorists,” —President Zardari
• Photographing the President: A look from 2 TIME photogs on covering the Bush White House.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YaHywf45sY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InI5n3NTvR4

• Model for the 21st century newsroom pt.6: new journalists for new information flows | Online Journalism Blog: Breaks down the responsibilities of a new media corp. very smartly. The six roles necessary: • Data Miner • Multimedia Producer • Newsfeed Aggregator • MoJo • Networking • Community Editor
• David Ardia: Why news orgs can police comments and not get sued Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: re: user content online and immunity granted by “CDA section 230” • you do not have remove defamatory material if legal action is brought against you until the court instructs you to do so. • you can…
• Team Obama Told to Ditch Instant Messaging - Politics news | Newser: How backward is this!? We finally bring in a team that wants to use technology in the US government that corporations rely on and the lawyers tell them it would be too embarrassing!?
• Study: Web Ad Prices Fall, Lowering Site Revenue - AppScout: No surprise here: online ad revenue is down in Q4 2008.
• MediaShift Idea Lab . Two Coders Head Off to 'Fix Journalism' | PBS: Why does journalism need programers? “Because it’s fucking important.”
• "Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted recently as saying, “All information wants to be free," - “Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted recently as saying, 'All information wants to be free,'”

• _ Time for Newspaper Folks to Fight Back! Here’s How _

• Yahoo BOSS Twitter Google App Engine = fresh news | Webware - CNET: Search meets real-time with by using twitter. You get authority from the press, and news value from crowdsourcing a’la twitter
• Can CNN, the Go-to Site, Get You to Stay? - NYTimes.com: CNN.com is profitable, but they’re still worried about innovation, and how to make money.
• “WHICH brings us to a pivotal issue: money. While audiences for online news sites are growing, “revenue is everyone’s billion-dollar question,” Mr. Brown says.”- Can CNN, the Go-to Site, Get You to Stay? - NYTimes.com
• Twitter May Have Found Its Business Model: Twitter…what is it good for? It turns out this little service is good for a whole lot of things, despite the loud objections of people who’ve never really …
• MediaShift . The Place of Blogs in Journalism Education | PBS “The notion of blogs as immediate, uncensored and unmediated can appear at odds with established journalistic norms and practices. But it provides a valuable learning tool as it makes the students…
• Hulu - It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia This is how transparency is supposed to work folks.

• "Synergy" means no need to "save" or "sync" on Palm's pre: Hotsync was hot technology in 2001, but with the Pre, Palm has totally removed the concept of user sync and assumed that you’re tied to The Cloud, not a computer at home. It’s Palm PR to say that the…The Renegades at the New York 'Times' - The All New Issue -- New York Magazine: Want to know why the New York Times is going to continue to be the standard for journalism in this country? Read this.
• “One of the New York Times’ roles in this new world is authority—and that’s probably the rarest commodity on the web,”

[](http://www.daylife.com/image/06KZf5Z5sy5SW?utm_source=zemanta&utm_medium=p&utm_content=06KZf5Z5sy5SW&utm_campaign=z1)

Image by [Getty Images](http://www.daylife.com/source/Getty_Images) via [Daylife](http://www.daylife.com)

• The Renegades at the New York ‘Times’ - The All New Issue — New York Magazine

• “Print is just a device. The New York Times is not just a newspaper, it’s a news organization.”- The Renegades at the New York ‘Times’ - The All New Issue — New York Magazine
• “Nick Bilton, who designs what his website describes, with ominous confidence, as 'technologies that will become commonplace in a 24-to-48-month time frame.'”- The Renegades at the New York ‘Times’ - The All New Issue — New York Magazine
•   Wooster Collective: Photoshop Adbusting In Belin 

(follow link for more detailed view)

• NBC's Mara Schiavocampo: Inside her digital toolkit - NBC's Mara Schiavocampo: Inside her digital toolkit:Schiavocampo is a digital journalist with NBC News.

Cast: Nieman Journalism Lab

• Rich Beckman discusses how to reshape journalism education | The Linchpen: A fantastic summary on what’s wrong with j-schools today and the tremendous challenge they face.

• UNCUT: Barkley, Wife at Their Gated House -
• From: Jerry YangSteve. Why do you keep ignoring my Facebook... - From: Rod Blagojevich How do you delete email that’s already been sent?

From: Barack Obama AirforceOne needs an XBOX. Hint, Hint.

Social Media: On the lighter side at CES

• New Media Douchebags Explained - How to blog, Twitter, podcast, poke, write on Facebook walls and become a new media douchebag. More at http://cinnamonpants.com

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSP8xm_gaK4

• New Web-based news agency going live on Monday - AFP-MediaWatch - New Web-based news agency going live on Monday - AFP-MediaWatch: The Global Post is a new newswire-like service for world news, focuses on new media and beat reporting, the project has exciting implications because it employs a freemium business model, along with…

• Skirting Laws, Iran Buys Bomb Parts From US Firms - World news | Newser - Skirting Laws, Iran Buys Bomb Parts From US Firms - World news | Newser: Are you kidding me!? I don’t know if I’m more embarrassed by the companies that will do anything to make a buck or by the inability of our government to NOT SELL WEAPONS TO THE EMENY.

• Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment - Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment: Do bloggers just opine while reporters do ‘journalism?’ The comments are particularly interesting, but present the same problem blogs do: They are a raw source of material — a source — that require a…

• "You are one of the millions of people who sit at a computer all day. Every hour you have 10 minutes..." - ““You are one of the millions of people who sit at a computer all day. Every hour you have 10 minutes where you’re not doing anything productive at work, and you can’t look at porn. So you make a comment and fulfill this desire to show yourself off as a smarty-pants.””

• —Marshall Poe, a professor of history and new media at the University of Iowa, who has studied Internet communities. All-Stars of the Clever Riposte - New York Times
• "People are doing it [commenting on blogs] for the same reason another generation of people called in..." - ““People are doing it [commenting on blogs] for the same reason another generation of people called in on talk radio.””

• —Shel Israel, a social media consultant and a columnist for Blogger & Podcaster magazine All-Stars of the Clever Riposte - New York Times

• Here Comes Another Bubble v1.1 - The Richter Scales - Here Comes Another Bubble v1.1 - The Richter Scales:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

• Crunchies 2008 - The Richter Scales - Crunchies 2008 - The Richter Scales The Richter Scales perform their new song at The Crunchies 2008.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53flB5R0AzQ

• Skirting Laws, Iran Buys Bomb Parts From US Firms - World news | Newser - Are you kidding me!? I don't know if I'm more embarrassed by the companies that will do anything to make a buck or by the inability of our government to NOT SELL WEAPONS TO THE EMENY.

• Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment - Do bloggers just opine while reporters do 'journalism?' The comments are particularly interesting, but present the same problem blogs do: They are a raw source of material — a source — that require a curator (pro. journalist) to make readable for the average person.

• New Web-based news agency going live on Monday - AFP-MediaWatch - The Global Post is a new newswire-like service for world news, focuses on new media and beat reporting, the project has exciting implications because it employs a freemium business model, along with content sharing.

• Why commenting on news sites still stinks: Further notes on the commenting survey results - Invisible Inkling - Conclusion: "Commenting on news stories is still broken. Busted. Stinks. It’s a mudpit. Still." Offers a few ways to fix the issue. Among them: let your reports respond to comments!
• 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design - Gives you a really good idea where design has headed now… we've just created a new position called UX designer that is responsible for creating the feel of your product … think Apple.

If anyone knows a good way to get wordpress to display tumblr links instead of delicious via postalicious, lemme know!

• DJ Strouse - A odd, but insightful look at what the economy might be without money as the currency.
• How I want to redefine my role, and the reader's role, in the newspaper | By Daniel Victor - The start of a mobile journalist (MoJo) career.
• Transparency as a PR Principle, Not a Tactic | PBS - In the internet age, where trust is a currency, companies ought to consider transparency of business a necessity if not an obligation.

Joey's thought: If civilization has developed far enough the economy to produce at at its current rate, and enough time is freed up for people to be investing it in goods and services that aren't necessities, perhaps it's time for us to look at currencies that aren't just monetary as a means of judging our economy. e.g. China produces a lot but isn't as trusted as US

If anyone knows a good way to get wordpress to display tumblr links instead of delicious via postalicious, lemme know!

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?

• Eyetracking research shows how younger readers view news websites - Eyetracking study summary: What works • left sided ads • sidebars (related links) • moving ads with women (regardless of side) What doesn't work • video • option to personalize the site • busy design
• DiSEL-Project.org - Somehow I just found this:

Consortium of papers that do 'eye-ball' research — fantastic implications for online advertising, and not in a good way.

• mental_floss Blog 6 Unusual Things Owned by Newspapers - The newspaper business just isn't profitable (anymore), but back when they were rolling in 20% profit margins, they could afford some horizontal growth. 6 things newspapers still own.
• Dan Froomkin: What Google Can Do for Journalism - A much better list of things Google could do for newspapers than http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/five-things-goo.html
• An Oral History of the Bush White House: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com - Fantastic piece on the entire Bush Administration. It's worth the long read. Format: Short summaries of major events chronologically introduce quotes from major players in the administration on the topic.
• Introducing Tweetbacks Plugin for Wordpress | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine - How to stylize the tweetbacks plugin for wordpress
• DigiDave | Communication is Key: Editors and Publishers - In a Battle Against Inertia - "If you have an idea - you should get your organization equipped to execute on it within two weeks, maximum."
• Eyetrack studies: What we've learned and how to conduct your own :: 10,000 Words :: multimedia, online journalism news and reviews - Interesting look at how people read newspaper sites. • People read in an "F" pattern • Seems like video is not a hot topic • banner ads are ignored

That said, I've got some complaints. Call it a wish list if you will. But after using this camera for about 6 months in a wide variety of situations, it's pretty safe to say that the tool isn't perfect. With the release of the D3x, I've come to realize that Nikon is advancing technology, but is clearly holding out for the next release to do anything drastic. I might/probably am too late to get into the D4 product cycle, but nonetheless…

What could be fixed for the Nikon D4

The OK button is useless. There are two ways to confirm a command in the menu system: hit OK, or hit the center of the 4-way dial. However, most things only require you to hit the 'right' button on the 4-way dial. The OK button, aside from being repetitive, is out of the wa I'd like to see a repeat of the D90's solution. Replace the 'push the center to confirm' option of the 4-way control with the OK button. This reduces clutter and makes menu navigating a more one-handed operation.

Read more…

• China's Electronic Waste Village - Photo Essays - TIME - Wish TIME would start doing some video or at least audio with these stories. Nonetheless, this one has some fantastic imagery and journalism.
• Commenting survey results - Invisible Inkling - Informal survey says: comments are less civil on news articles than on blogs. Hypothesis: disproven.
• BBC NEWS | South Asia | Swat diary: 'Taleban rule now' - It's short, but it's really good journalism. It's proof you need feet on the ground to report.

If anyone knows a good way to get wordpress to display tumblr links instead of delicious via postalicious, lemme know!

• Mainebiz - A new freesheet practicing the Guerilla journalism style is starting in Portland.
• How the newspaper industry tried to invent the Web but failed. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine - The claim: Newspapers were early to get online, they just didn't get on the open web soon enough. The problem: Newspaper structure is inherently flawed for internet consumption. Ad rates alone cannot sustain the newsroom, newspapers have become distracted by video as their answer, and stock price is too much of a concern. There's probably more to add to that list too.
• Public Press FAQ | The Public Press - Here's a radical idea: share your published articles with Public Press, a non-profit that receives its money NPR fashion, so there are no ads.

• 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.

I've got my Death Valley trip photos up on flickr. Not too bad on the time too! Took me 6 days to work up the courage to sort through the nearly 1000 photos I shot, cull, edit, caption, and keyword them all.

No GPS on this trip, so Geotagging is out. Bummer.

Read more…

• December: Newspapers that use Twitter | graphic designr - A look at the newspapers using twitter, and how fast they're expanding. Cool!
• BBC - Journalism Labs - blog - Nifty new technology that allows users to interact with video.

• L.A. County restaurant health inspection scores - Los Angeles Times - It's not pretty, but it's a really good example of a newspaper looking to use their site as a platform and providing content that users can't find elsewhere.

It's actually 10 things every journalist should ask before clicking 'publish'

1. Are we making our community feel better-informed or merely distracted?
2. How important is this for our community to know and why?
3. Are we chasing the larger story, or just the latest story?
4. Are we synthesizing information, or merely aggregating it?
5. How are we serving those who know [nothing | a lot] about the topic?
6. Have we provided a clear trail through our coverage? [HAVE YOU LINKED?]
7. Are we using 1,000 words where a picture should be? [Hey, remember that video thing those guys were talking about? It works if it's relevant. If you've made it this far, it's relevant]
8. How good are our filters? [tag, and SEO please!]
9. Will our coverage find its audience where and when they’re ready for it? [more SEO, and more SEO, and more SEO]
10. How are we managing our own info overload? [setup]

(tags: Technology&Science Newspapers Journalism NewMedia)

Israel Invades Gaza - Photo Essays - TIME

Fantastic photos from the latest Israeli invasion of Gaza.

(tags: World Photography MiddleEast Gaza Military)

It drives me crazy to see journalist putting the nail in their own coffin. E&P just republished an AP story that politely complains that Israel still isn't letting journalists into the Gaza war zone.

No wonder 54% of the public doesn't trust the media anymore. Instead of playing Fourth Estate watchdogs, these journalists have been nicely asking the courts of Israel for permission to do their jobs. Nevermind the fact the Israeli government and Hamas are controlling the story and spewing propaganda. It's still a good idea to wait on one of these governments to allow you into a region when they can control what you see.

Grow some balls.

Do your jobs. Please. You're only hurting yourselves through your laziness and ignorance. Don't moan about how hard it is. If were easy, we wouldn't need professional journalists in the first place!

Journalists are expected to add value to what people on the ground tell us in order to curate and inform the mass-public about the actions of governments, industry, and events of the day. How can we do any of that if we're not able to report!?

Journalists. Step up. Now.

•  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 more…

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!

The problem with social networking spread out to the masses was that there were too many unsustainable, social networks created.

Put simply: no one wants to fill out a registration form. And, yes, it's more than just the hassle involved. Another registration form means another identity online. Another profile to update, another community to participate in.

Read more…

Alright… so the megapixel war is old and worn. It probably doesn't really matter too much anymore, but it sure is amazing to see some of these new cameras. 24 MP is a boatload of resolution. Bringing down the base ISO to 100, a really smart move for studio shooters. But, if the rumors are to be believed, this will be a $8000 camera - aimed at medium format shooters.

Makes sense… the ease of use of a SLR is really convenient in a studio. Digital backs are really hiRes, but are equally as hard to work with. Not to mention, you can use the Nikkor lens system.

It's a bummer that they didn't change the layout of the buttons a bit. I like the D300 method of putting the OK button in the center of the command dial.

I'll most likely go back and edit this post soon, but for now, I'm exhausted from a 8 hour marathon to finish a Knight News Challenge grant for CoPress.

Update: click here for sample of the D3x at high ISOs. (thanks to Trusted Reviews)

Commentator sgwhitefla got me thinking in the last post…

Swampland - TIME.com

A writer, from a major news source, responding to a commentator!? How very, blog like!

In other news, it seems like TIME is already following a possible business model for an online newsroom.

Just to prove that I'm not a total fan boy: TIME is facing some financial difficulties. But… this restructuring may be a part of the need for a smaller, sleeker newsroom (more on that soon!)

Red's new Epic or Scarlet systems and you get a custom configured video/still camera.

It's a shame the thing is so darn expensive. As far as I can see:

Pros

• Dynamic range: 11+ or 13+ stops!!
• FPS: 30+!!
• Unless you go real low end, you'll be getting really good resolution.
• You can use Canon and Nikon Lenses!
• If you've got the money to put into accessories: configure your 'brain' as a still camera one day and then a video camera, the next.

Cons

• Price, you're gonna have to spend a boatload to get a decent setup. ($7000 to use Nikon or Canon Lenses)
• Judging from the configuration above, this is gonna feel like a medium format camera – the fast and light of a DSLR might be outa the question.
• The earliest we're gonna see anything is Spring 2009, and most likely won't see the whole line until 2010.

Things I still wanna hear about

• Storage: 24MP at 30FPS is gonna add up fast. Are we storing on harddrives, huge flash drives, what?
• They claim this huge dynamic range: trust, but verify.
• Will there be an optical viewfinder?
• How much do accessories like the DSLR grip cost?
• What about flash? There doesn't seem to be a hotshoe.

This is a little old now, but worth mentioning: I've won an awarded a 'best practices' recognition from the Poynter Institute for the Light the Night audio slideshow above.

I'm not really accustom to positive re-inforcement, but it did feel good to be told "good job." Especially from an organization like Poynter. I'm grateful, thank you.

Now let me bite the hand that feeds me. I would never have put this particular show up for 'best practices.' I think that it's a really poor example of an audio slideshow. The photos have nothing to do with the audio, the audio is poor, the interview is poor, and the whole thing is too short for the story involved.

But, I'll use one of my favorite words here: meh… whatever. Cheers to the recognition, and let's hope someone looks at the article and finds it helpful.

I’m still shaking my head over the American Press Institute’s announcement of a closed-door, invitation-only emergency meeting of only CEO-level newspaper executives to, in the words of E&P “ponder ways to revive the newspaper business.”

This is the last thing the newspaper industry needs.

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » The last thing newspapers need

This will be a quick post. I'll get more on the topic of old media vs. new in a while but I wanted to share this little tidbit of news.

A closed door meeting by the old heads and bean-counters who have constantly failed to create any solutions for newspapers in the first place is a terrible idea. I'd present my list of what needs to be done, but I'll refer to A Photo Editor instead (the list is decent, but more on that later.)

Here are my 5 easy steps to making the transition to a new media economy:

1. Plow all of your profits back into the your company. Then get into the savings account an grab some of the profits from the 90’s when you were getting obscenely rich off your advertisers and plow some of that back into the product. Use it to make mistakes.

2. Gather all the employees you were about to fire because they don’t fit in so well with your organization or because they are too green to have mastered traditional publishing and give them promotions. Put them in charge. Gather all the people you’ve trained to say no to change and yes to whatever you say is good and fire them (ok I know this will mean there is nobody left in accounting and IT so keep a few of them around but maybe go for the junior ones).

3. Now, add staff and make everyone spend half the day doing traditional print work and half the day working on the online thing (it’s not a magazine). Make sure they try lots of crazy ideas and make lots of mistakes.

4. Invest in your contributors. You spend a tiny fraction of your production costs on the contributors yet the product without them is worthless. If you don’t start building some loyalty with your content creators they will leave you when a better deal comes along.

5. Photography is the key. Figure out how to use it. Video online is TV. We already know that works. Text online is, well, it’s great to read at a certain length but you know, it’s always going to work better printed. Photography is the perfect medium for communication online.

Change or die. It’s up to you.

A Photo Editor – A Call For Change In The Publishing Industry_ (emphasis added)_

I'm watching Saturday Night Live right now, and just saw a commercial from Starbucks making the case not only to vote, but for just caring. Oh, and they promised a free cup of coffee if you vote on Tuesday.

More after the show.

Update: The ad is on the front page of Starbuck's right now (it's not embeddable).

Update 2: Found on YouTube (now).

Post show…(next day, after falling asleep after SNL)

I guess I should explain why this ad got me so excited. Essentially, I see this ad as a great experiment in viral marketing for both Starbucks and politics.

Starbucks has positioned themselves as a high-end, green, luxury, hang-out for hipsters and soccer moms both. Voting is such a good topic for them to try to tackle – it affects both groups equally. Giving out a freebie in this poor economy when luxury goods are suffering from their elastic nature is a great idea.

Far more important is the social example. Roughly 64% of the country votes, and that's despicable. If more companies publicly supported politics in general (as in Starbucks), or even took sides (as in many Silicon Valley Companies) perhaps the apathy that my generation feels would be decreased. Corporate sponsorship sounds like a good idea to me :)

My curiosity piqued, I flipped through it, read a summary (a review of the "good ol' times" of journalism) and the copyright date (sometime in the 70s). What choice did I have but to mock Andy for reading out-dated literature about a now-dead job while wishing for the return of drinking on the job. I told him to do like me: read a few blogs instead.

Andy's a great guy – we get along really well, even if we disagree on… everything. His focus (both personally, and as the Enterprise Editor) is on improving the quality of writing and reporting around the paper. The rants about ledes and grammar Andy goes off on would make Wooward cry.

My job, as the Exponent of the Evolution, is on expanding the use of 'new media.' It's all about the blogging, podcasting, videos, tweeting… I'm also not the quality hound that Andy is. It's all about the 'version 1' for me; if we can just get something online: we've made progress. We can worry about improving the next version.

In a recent round of blog posts (1, 2, 3) responding to a Washington Post article on the victimization of the press, Jeff Jarvis writes:

The reason to take responsibility for the fall of journalism is to take responsibility for the fate of journalism. Who’s going to try to save it if not for journalists? We are indeed responsible for the future of journalism and we have about one minute to grab that bull by its horns.

-BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » It is our fault

Realization strikes: Andy and I aren't that philosophically far apart. We're both trying to 'save journalism' – through different routes.

Though I firmly believe that newspapers are the only medium that is doing true journalism nowadays (broadcast TV sure isn't), I think that the future lies in the ability of newspapers to adapt to the internet age. They've got to realize that blogging, the link, multimedia, commenting, and an unlimited newshole have forever changed the business.

Andy would rather focus on the basics – good reporting. He argues that the bar is constantly being lowered (an example) and saving journalism means raising it back up through better sourcing, good writing, etc.

I'm still think that reporting is the most important service a newspaper provides (sounds obvious, but tell that to the bean counters), and Andy is one of my premiere video podcasters. We're willing to recognize the strength of the other's arguement-–we just have different approaches to journalism.

Saving journalism is not just about moving a newspaper online, it's not about figuring out a new revenue model, it's not about multimedia, it's about finding the balance of all three to ensure the future of the media information industry.

And that future is… us. The current generation of college graduates who are aware of the what the internet can do, who aren't biased by the way things used to be (Andy possibly excluded). There is a gap of understanding between generation X & Y on the use of the web. With a younger, more tech savvy generation coming into the industry it's up to us to figure out how to meld the nutty world that the interweb has become into the the sphere of journalism.

The problems that the newspaper industry face right now can largely be overcome by realizing that we're not in the newspaper business, we're in the media information business. Those of us young'ins who are just starting in this industry have an idea of how to reinvent journalism to survive in the internet age.

If you've got a computer problem, who do you look to for a fix? You're nearest 15 year old who has already forgotten more about computers than you ever cared to know? Journalism has a computer-problem right now. Take a look at us young folks for a fix.

• My 'office' is more of a conference room.

† The Daily Orange 'newsroom' is a converted house. So there is no real newsroom floor, there are no real offices, we mostly consider ourselves lucky to have a desk and a roof.

I would have typically written a longer form piece here, but I've come to realize that a) I have very little time for blog writing anymore, b) it was a more appropriate post for CoPress to comment on, c) Let's face it, more people read CoPress than read here :)

no time for words - let’s let the moving images do the talking

-Without further ado: Reverie « Vincent Laforet’s Blog

Click here to see the video.

This is the future. It's astounding. Amazing. Phenomenal. [Insert your adjectives here.]

Things that stand out to me:

• Wide angle glass (the car scene) distorts in a funky way on video. I'm sure Laforet used a 16-35mm lens to shoot from the hood of the car – it gives a really cool perspective, and the distortion (pretty significant on that lens to begin with) is something else.
• The low light capabilities of this camera are amazing.
• The dynamic range on this camera is just astounding. See: the rearview mirror shot, the shot from the hood of the car.
• The camera can shoot high-speed no problem. See: the tunnel shot.

I probably missed a thing or too, but I'll end with this: I'm really glad it's DSLRs are merging still photography and video instead of video camera companies tackling the problem. It's true that I'm just more used to the DSLR workflow than video camera workflow, but I really think that video cameras have developed some bad practices that I don't like to deal with. Some of these:

• Poor low light performance, the solution has been just to add a light to the top of the camera.
• Using tapes. Video went digital but brought analog tapes along with it. This means slow import times, no-reusability of recording media, the need to use tape, etc
• Video camera lenses tend to do telephoto better than DSLR lens do (they're smaller and lighter), but still camera lenses have much more creative flexibility (eg. fisheyes, wide-angles, lower f-stops, etc). I know some indie videographers that have setup systems to use still camera lenses on their video cameras.

Cheers, to Canon, it looks like you've got a real winner here – let's hope Nikon can replicate the performance.

Check out DPreview's review here.

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:

• Promotion and advocacy of 'new media' at the paper. Blogging, audio slideshows, video, podcasting, video podcasting, etc.
• 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.
• 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.

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!

As amazing as the D3 is, I'm starting to feel pretty good about not having one right now.

See, if I owned a D3, then I wouldn't have a justification for purchasing a newly rumored RED DSLR.

I'm literally drooling over the prospect. If RED can do for the still camera industry what it's done for the video, we've got a heckuva camera on our hands .

Reading between the lines, and applying a little RED history 101, we expect to see a stripped-down still camera with modular add-ons, a very sensitive and film-like full-frame sensor and some crazy shooting speeds due to the RAW compression.

-RED Takes Aim at DSLR Market, Photographers Salivate | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

My speculations on features:

• 20+ FPS * 12mp * video capablities * able to use the existing RED glass

"What we are paying for is not cost-effective," says Smith, who notes that he would save about $32,000 per year under new rates, but still sees the nearly-$400,000 annual cost as too high. "The money we save will help me preserve local staff jobs."

-Four More Newspapers Intend To Drop AP Over Rates

I'm not sure what my stance on the AP is right now:

I'm probably missing a few points, but those are what come to mind first.

…and, it looks like I don't really have a point to this post. Just a musing that the AP needs to tread carefully.

I especially like some of the unique perspectives shown – and the interesting insight, that despite his lack of hair, Obama actually has a very unique profile, and is easy to silhouette.

I'm an happy Nikon fan-boy.

I've been saying privately that still photography will be dead in 10 years. It will simply be easier to shoot video and take a frame from the capture after the fact. Cameras like the Red ONE (and soon, the Red EPIC) are revolutionizing the video capturing field. With 12mp capture at 60fps and really good dynamic range, the stills look fantastic. As soon as storage in the field gets figured out (trust me, 12mp video files are huge) this camera becomes a snap for photojournalists.

But…

Now Nikon has gone and tackled the problem from the still image end. The new D90 shoots video – 720p video, and apparently it does it fairly well. You get all the advantages of the D300 sensor (that's right, it's high ISO video time baby!), and the awesome depth of field of still camera lenses.

This is the revolution! The D90 is a phenomenal camera that every PhotoJ is going to need to have in their bag – though if you're on a budget, I'd wait a while, seems like Nikon's rate of innovation (that seems like it needs an acronym) is increasing – I'd bet we get a higher-end model that shoots video within the next 15 months.

I do have a coupla questions:

• can you attach a mic to the camera? Do we have to wait for a higher end model than that?
• how much does the GPS suck battery life?
• 720p video is huge – how much can you fit on a puny SD card?
• what's the lag time for setting up video on the camera? Can I switch between video and still easily?
• can shutter speed and aperture be adjusted while the camera is shooting? - how much does shooting video drain the batter?
• Jarvis shows the D90 with a vertical grip – are we getting vert. grips on the prosumer line now too!?

Signing off, – a very happy New Media photog (and Nikon fan-boy)

Update

Nikon has posted some sample video. Nothing ground breaking but interesting to see. Things worth noting:

• there is no autofocus in movie mode (not too surprising, but a bummer)

• The high ISO performance is outstanding

• I'm excited to see the D400 (with movie mode), heck, the D4 (with movie mode)

• still don't know if attaching an external mic is an option (doubtful)

I am a very lucky man. I've spent the last 24 years at the Los Angeles Times as a photographer and a photo editor. I can tell you what it's like in the eye of a typhoon, in a firestorm, under an offshore oil platform or the wrong side of the green line in Mogadishu. I know what a whale feels like and I've buzzed icebergs. I've had lunch with rock stars and seen President's sweat. I've tried to get Carolyn Cole out of jail, even.

When I die, I hope I have a bag of popcorn, because if my life flashes by, it's going to be a hell of a show.

Best of all, I've had the pleasure of your company. I can't imagine a more engaging, talented and dedicated group of people anywhere. Years ago, I was cooling my heals at some news event next to a New York Times reporter who had worked here. She said, "Oh! The Los Angeles Times! The New York Times is warm on the outside but cold on the inside. The Los Angeles Times is warm on the outside and warm on the inside."

Civility. Kindness. Fairness. Intelligence. These are the qualities that pervade the Los Angeles Times. Stay here for a while, and it get's in your blood.

Those folks who pine for the demise of the gatekeeper media don't know squat. What people really want out of the news business is a fair shake. We do that here. We worry about the truth and getting it right the first time.

There were 1,200 of us, but now there are a little more than half of that. I like to think that the Los Angeles Times is not so much diminished as dispersed. All those folks who have left the building still carry the Los Angeles Times spirit around with them. It's my turn to join them.

I am a very lucky man.

Bob Carey

Laid off LA Times photog, Bob Cary, via Tell Zell: Bye Lines, LA Times

• 15.1 megapixel CMOS sensor
• DIGIC 4
• 1.6x crop
• Dust Reduction
• Auto Brightness Processing
• 95% viewfinder .97 magnification
• 9 point af (All Cross Type)
• 35 meter area equipped with high-precision sensors
• AF Fine Tuning
• ISO 100-12800
• 6.3 fps (high speed) 3fps (low speed)
• Buffer: 16 RAW - 60 JPG - 10 RAW+JPG
• 920,000 points VGA 3.0-inch LCD monitor
• 100,000 cycle shutter
• Rugged magnesium alloy body

Canon 50D Info Leaked - REAL SPECS! - Digital Camera Reviews, News and Resources | Photography Bay

As presumably the successor to the aged 5D, the 50D has a lot to live up to with new competition from the Nikon D700. Unfortunately for Canon, it looks like Nikon's got them beat in everything buy megapixels (Canon: 15mp, Nikon: 12mp), fps (Canon: 6.3 fps, Nikon 5-8 fps), and body material (Canon: metal alloy, Nikon: polycarbonate). Nikon's still going to run the table with their higher ISO, faster auto-focus, and more fps (with vertical grip).

Let me take a moment to explain: I'm not talking about coffee vs. tea, or McDonald's vs. Burger King. It's not even an issue of Obama vs. McCain – we're just as clueless as the rest of the country when it comes to politics.

Our parents we're one of the greatest generation_{(pun intended)} of upstarts the US ever saw – they were responsible for protesting the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and Watergate. The Baby Boomers, they knew how to protest. We, just don't seem to care.

There are tons of issues that the youth of this country could get riled up about. My top three: We've got a president that's blatantly broken the law with a do-nothing congress to boot. We're involved in not one, but two, failing wars that kill more of our generation every week. We've broken the prison system with more inmates than it can handle – largely due to the failed War on Drugs.

And what do we do? Do we write petitions? Vote out our congress? March on the Capitol? Riot? Demand that the troops come home? Do we do anything even remotely radical?

Bring back the 70s.

At least the hippies, blacks, and press knew when they were getting screwed. They stood up and did something about it. They marched, protested, investigated, demanded, pursued, and were otherwise activists!

So, all that's been on my mind for about a year. Obviously, I'm perturbed by what I see to be a failing of my peers. Which is why when I read an article about the lack of true war photography in the New York Times, I felt both more perturbed and a little relieved.

Obviously, preventing pictures of dead soldiers from appearing in the press is yet another example of the Bush Administration's efforts at censorship.

…military commanders worry about security in publishing images of the American dead as well as an affront to the dignity of fallen comrades. Most newspapers refuse to publish such pictures as a matter of policy.

4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images - NYTimes.com

Yet, as the article points out, during the Vietnam War, the press published photos of dead soldiers, civilians, and whatever else they please. This, in part, got the folks back home disgusted with the war. It got them out in the streets protesting the war. Perhaps this dumbing down of our media coverage has caused the American people to forget these wars. To forget their responsibility to tell the government when it has strayed down the wrong path.

I'm satisfied that I've found part of the explanation, but I'm more troubled by what the slow decay of the media is causing.

These videos are rather academic, and would be boring to watch, but their content is so amazing that I was entertained the whole time. The ease and quality of the result is simply astounding.

First off, we don't really understand it. Most Americans still don't understand the difference between Sunnis and Shiites – that's been seven years now. This conflict came out of nowhere, and the average American (myself included) really doesn't understand the reason for the fighting, or even who's really involved. 

To make matters worse, we've got a juicy political sex scandal in Edwards, a tight presidential campaign, and the Olympics going on right now. Needless to say, our sex-crazed media is on top of all that instead of a war that no one understands.

Reuters has done a remarkably good job of doing what they do best – keeping foreign agencies so that they can respond to something just like this. Right now, this is a bigger story than Afghanistan and Iraq. In my opinion, it beats out another sex scandal, a tired presidential campaign, and a sporting event. This is about a war between two countries who's people don't live in the Bronze Age.

When I first looked at TIME's collection of photos my first reaction was: "meh, more war photographs."

But here's what's different: this is a modern war. Fought with modern tanks, modern armies where both sides are uniformed, and civilian casualties that no one is apologizing for. This is a big deal. Once you get past your seven-year familiarity with war photos, these photos reflect their own importance.

Update

The NYT has an article explaining some of the background.

Update 2

The Denver Post also as a rather good collection of AP photos.

I'm very impressed by their most recent utilization though. They've taken the 'gaffes' of each of the political campaigns, allowed you to view them and then let you vote on how much they matter. It's pretty funny to see what the News Media has been focusing their coverage on.

Annoyances

Watching the coverage online requires Microsoft Silverlight, which (now) supports Macs, but it means installing some Microsoft bloatware onto your system (yuk).

Silverlight is competitor to the ubiquitous Adobe Flash. In this blogger's humble opinion, MS has no chance to take the market. It's annoying to have to install the software just to watch the Olympics. Of course, kudos to MS for getting their software in such a preimo spot (we'll ignore the MSNBC connection). I sure do wish NBC had provided a Flash alternative though.

Incompetencies

On Technically Incorrect | CNet, Chris Matyszczyk blogged about his experience watching the Olympics online. Let's just say that NBC was less than professional:

Wait, wait.

The scrolling commentary has political news: "Iran, USA detente at the head of the main peloton as Iran's climber Hussein Askari takes a flyer and is joined by (we think) USA's Jason McCartney."

We think? We think? This might be a U.S. assault on Iran. And all they can say is "We think"?

Censors not able to keep up with NBC's online Olympics coverage | CNet

And, it seems that NBC has concluded that if their talking heads are writing, and not talking, they can spew even more BS than they typically do:

This is how he has just spoken to me in writing: "The first time up the major climb of the finish circuit has substantially damaged the peloton, but we are still waiting on names and time gaps."

So this commentator is telling me he has no idea who is winning, no idea who is second, no idea who is third, and no idea of the time differences between the riders.

Lies

Slashdot is a news aggregation site for nerds. If someone on that site notices something fishy going on with the news media, you can be pretty sure that a) What they say happened, happened. b) It's pretty out of the box because, this is not a site that usually notes this kind of thing. Below is the full text of the blurb on Slashdot.

"Viewing the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony online at NBC's Olympics website, you can see that the order in which the countries were presented was very different from the actual order of the countries in the ceremony, as listed at Wikipedia. NBC skipped roughly 100 countries ahead, then jumped back and forth, apparently delaying the appearance of the United States in its home market until later in the broadcast. (In fact, the US team was shown on the infield before they were shown marching!) NBC did not acknowledge this in its broadcast. Is NBC altering the reality of the broadcast to boost ratings? Was this true only online, or also in the live broadcast?"

Slashdot | Did NBC Alter the Olympics' Opening Ceremony?

Bear in mind, that if you live on the West Coast of the US you got to watch these opening ceremonies a full half day after they happened – just so that NBC could show it to you in primetime.

I'm going to enjoy the Olympics throughly, I'm also going to take everything that NBC shows with a grain(s) of salt.

Update

Technically Incorrect has posted another article about digital fakery in the opening ceremonies and the continued use of the word 'live.' Read it here.

In case there was any doubt – NBC is raking in the dough from this Olympics. According to Sean McManus, Olympic commercials cost $1 million a piece.

Newsweek has their photographer's blogging their experiences at the Olympics. Very cool for photo junkies (like me). There are some interesting photography anecdotes, and a lot of the stories give you a glimpse into how China is running their Olympics.

Read the blogs here.

My favorite new features:

• filter bar
• localized corrections
• it's a localized correction, but the graduated filter wasn't in the beta, and is AMAZING
• keywording interface

There are of course other new features too!

Oh, and photos of the trip coming soon.

Sam Zell took over the paper in January. After promising that the path to growth was not through cuts, he immediately began cutting. So far, Zell has ousted over 200 reporters, photographers, copy editors and editors from the Los Angeles Times. Hundreds of other editorial workers have been fired from other papers in the Tribune chain. This is not business acumen. This is not saving money. This is suicide.

Our aim is to convince Zell that he has taken the wrong path to bettering our paper—both journalistically and financially. But if we cannot do that, then our aim is to convince Zell to sell the paper to an owner who actually cares about Los Angeles, about great journalism, about kicking ass and taking names and speaking truth to power.

I have the fortune not to work for the Tribune Co., which as I've said previously is not going about its business the right way, so I have no direct stake in the matter. But, I do lend my full support to these guys – unions are a tricky thing, but at this point – may not be a bad idea.

"Take Back The Times."

I thought I'd put photojournalism and war behind me four and a half years ago when I traded in the dusty battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan for law school in Miami. But those words reminded me that you never truly leave the battlefield behind.

-Ricochet - washingtonpost.com

“The whole chain had to be reinvented,” said Peter Griffin, the deputy editor. “The interesting thing is it has almost nothing to do with the normal way of putting out a magazine.”

-News Flash From the Cover of Esquire - Paper Magazines Can Be High Tech, Too - NYTimes.com

Griffin is referring to Esquire's investment in New Media technology – a digital magazine cover. That's right, a dynamic, moving 'paper' magazine. There are no images that I can find of this baby in action – but what a great idea!

Not only that, but this is pushed by some of the top editors of the Media Industry – the very folks who are often accused of not getting 'it' when it comes to New Media.

Cheers Esquire – I'm looking forward to it!

note: Esquire – I really hope that you can deliver this technology at a low cost. If you charge double for a moving cover magazine, you'll do well on the initial issue, but once the novelty wears off, people will forgo the lack of functionality for lower costs.

"They embedded a war photographer, and when I took a photo of war, they disembedded me," Zoriah says. "It's as if it's okay to take pictures of them handing lollipops to kids on the street and providing medical care, but photographing the actual war is unacceptable."

Disembedded: Marines Send a War Photographer Packing

Our efforts in nation-building, governance and counternarcotics should be smaller and more creative. This is not because these issues are unimportant; they are vital for Afghanistan's future. But only the Afghan government has the legitimacy, the knowledge and the power to build a nation. The West's supporting role is at best limited and uncertain.

-How to Save Afghanistan - TIME

TIME's article How to Save Afghanistan is fantastically written and simply worded. It presents a surprisingly easy solution for how to fix Afghanistan – do less.

The solution is deceptively simple when you think about it. We suck at building a government. We're good at education (well, better than Afghanistan anyway). We're good at farming. We can train an army. We can build power plants. Let's stop trying to fight all these insurgents. Let's stop trying to tell the Afghans how to run their country. Let's just give them the support ask for to build their country up. If they try to build something we don't like? We don't support it.

Transforming a nation of 32 million people is a task not for the West but for Afghans.

The judge wrote that he expects Gertz "will be prepared to testify regarding the newsworthiness of this case and, more particularly, the reasons why maintaining the confidentiality of his sources is critical to his ability to engage in investigative reporting."

Judge Tells Reporter To Explain Spy Story - washingtonpost.com

The US is not a particularly great place to be if you're a reporter trying to protect sources. This latest ruling is just another example.

It seems as though the national security is more important than a free press for the public good in nearly every case. At what point does national security gain more by the advancement and continuation of the free press than the suppression of information and the increased secrecy of the government for and by the people?

Update:

Greenslade writes that Judge Cormac Carney has protected Bill Gertz from identifying his sources. At least the ruling was favorable.

This mostly works fine until you get an admittedly minor problem like the one above. Maybe its just because I have a personal grudge against this President for subverting the Congress, but the president's picture should never appear as a representation of the Congress.

Now, this is a relatively minor mistake, and will self-correct once a new story gets sorted to the top of the US Congress category, but nonetheless, its little things like that make me distrust the auto-aggregation model. I think other people feel the same way (purely a feeling). This society wants people to tell them what's going on, not a computer. It's a marketing/perception problem.

Spurred by the continued housing crisis, turmoil in financial markets, spiking oil prices, disappearing jobs and shrinking retirement savings, the nation and its political leaders have begun to sour on the notion that the current market system [the free market] is the key to a fair, stable and efficient society.

-Americans may be losing faith in free markets - Los Angeles Times

I've blogged several times (1, 2, 3, more) in the last couple of weeks on the success of the free market in correcting downward trends in the news business. I've got a lot of faith in the law of supply and demand to eventually correct itself.

That's the keyword: eventually.

Markets don't correct themselves overnight. There is no such thing as a quick fix when it comes to economics, but it seems that the US populace has become so enamored with instant feedback that we expect everything to just happen.

Loading a web page: just happens.

Finding out the names of Bardgelina's twins: just happens.

9 soldiers dying in _Iraq Afghanistan _{(oh right, we already forgot about that war)}: just happens.

Global warming doesn't just happen.

The energy_oil deficit doesn't just happen.

The Presidency eroding constitutional rights of the Congress, the Judiciary, the Press, and the People, doesn't just happen.

An economic recession doesn't just happen.

A robust economy doesn't just happen.

This society, that so needs instant gratification, needs to learn that there are limits to what technology provides.

Just because the cell phone lets us say "I'll just call you," instead of planning ahead,

Just because you can text message, twitter, facebook status, IM, or blog,

Just because you can find, meet, date, engage, online,

Just because we can watch live pictures of our tanks rolling across foreign boarders,

It doesn't mean that technology has solved all the world's problems. Our country, our society, has a system in place that works. Yes, the system needs to be changed from time to time, we've done it a lot. But do we need to abandon our Constitution, our economic policies, our way of life just because there are bad times?

The free market works. It goes in cycles of good and bad times, but it works. It's natural. Please, please, just because we've allowed our government to abandon its system, don't think the economy needs to change. It's not worth it! It's not right!

STOP with the ADD! The grass is not always greener, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Try not to pick up every shiny object that comes your way, sometimes, it's a chainsaw.

Steve asks for the following:

Allow local newspapers to scrape Craigslist ads.

Allow consumers to place ads on Craigslist via newspaper websites.

Add links on Craigslist to newspaper website classified sections.

Add a news component to Craigslist.

An open letter to Craigslist | ReinventingClassifieds.com

None of these seem unreasonable, they even have the potential to make Craigslist some money.

Steve is not asking the world, and who knows, there might be some really money-making ideas here. The problem, as commentors have posted, is that newspapers are not setup to accept outside support. Therefore, even if Craigslist listens to Steve chances are that no one will care.

This just goes back to the main problem of the Newspaper industry – they need to stop behaving like corperations and more like the smart and nimble web 2.0 companies that they are striving to be.

Chicago Tribune editor and senior vice president Ann Marie Lipinski announced her resignation, less than a week after the paper announced significant cuts to its newsroom staff and a reduction in the number of weekly pages it prints.

-Chicago Tribune Editor Resigns | Free Press

Two things occur to me:

1. There is a glut of top editors resigning from top news papers, these leaves a lot of talent out there for the picking. One the one hand, it's a crying shame:

"[The] decision was difficult and a long time coming and it would be inaccurate to attribute it to any one event," Lipinski, 52, who joined the paper as an intern in 1978 and was named the 161-year-old newspaper's 20th editor in 2001, wrote in her memo.

On the other, it leaves other top papers the option of getting top talent that they need.

2. Which nicely goes to my second thought: the free market strikes again! Papers that are pursuing a loosing strategy, and I strongly believe that the Tribune Co. falls into that category, will cause all of their talent to go to other papers. These companies will make it through the tough times boosted by their smart employees.

So I say this: yes the job market sucks, but newspapers should keep this in mind: buy low, sell high. The 'market' sucks right now - it's time to invest!

MobileMe got off to a rocky start. The dotmac website stated that they system would be offline from 8pm-2am beginning Wednesday evening (Jul 9) to facilitate the transition. The presumption was that me.com would go live at 2am, which did not happen. Me.com went through periods of service and through Friday (the day of the iPhone 3G launch). The system became fast enough to be usable on Saturday (Jul 12, the date

It's so shiiiinyyy

Let's get this clear, me.com is pretty. Really, really pretty. It almost feels like a desktop app. You can use keyboard shortcuts just like a desktop app (replace ⌘ key with the ctrl key and you already know the keyboard shortcuts). You can drag and drop just like a desktop app. Windows slide down just like a desktop app. In case you didn't get it, it feels like a desktop app!

Switching between modules requires a load time, but actions within any one of the modules doesn't seem to incur a load time at all (very cool).

Based on SproutCore, MobileMe feels quick. Yet, there are still a few remaining speed issues. I've tried to upload over 5GB of photos to my iDisk via the desktop interface and the transfer has taken 9+ hours to get half way; reading another 9 hours to complete. (This upload later failed; twice.) Accessing the 'account settings' section of the web interface is hit or miss. Sometimes it pops right up, sometimes it just displays "loading" for eternity. No doubt, these are both symptoms of a freshly launched app, nonetheless, they are annoying.

iDisk

iDisk web interface.

The iDisk webapp works much as you'd expect. It's the same column interface that Finder has. Clicking on a folder reveals the files and directories contained. I haven't figured out the pattern yet, but sometimes the app displays a loading icon you click on a folder, and sometimes it doesn't. Also, the app gives no indication that you've clicked on an empty folder. In contrast, Finder tells the user that a directory has "0 items," the iDisk webapp has no visual indication, and frequently left me watching the computer screen hoping something would load.

The interface does not allow for previewing of files. Click on a jpg and the app will tell you that it's a jpg, but it doesn't display a thumbnail. The system also does not recognize RAW files. It would be nice to have a 'quicklook' like functionality so that a user didn't have to download a file to see what it is.

Preferences for iDisk are extremely simple. You have the choice of displaying a 'Simple Folder Layout' - only Documents, Public and Movies are shown in iDisk home. The app behaves as you'd expect it too, and in someways is more responsive than the desktop plugin. Which is continually having connection issues. It seems that my iDisk can't stay connect for more than several hours at a time – no big deal until I try to transfer several gigabytes of files.

Deleting files on the iDisk via the desktop takes a very long time. But, the process is fast on the web app, and the changes are reflected nearly instantaneously on the desktop side.

In addition, I was surprised to see the webapp lacking two key features. 1) It is not capable of uploading directories, even though it can upload multiple files. The help instructs users to compress (zip) their directories first – what a poor solution. 2) Even though Contacts and Mail have instant search, iDisk does not. erm… makers of Spotlight – HELLO! I'd like to be able to search my files online too please. K, thanks.

I was impressed at the integration, but constantly frustrated by webapp limitations and the glacial communications times when using the desktop interface. iDisk is not ready for large file transfers but with luck, Apple will fix the bugs and speed will increase in the near future.

Gallery

Gallery is the me.com interface for hosting your photos. Think of it as the web based iPhoto.

The frontend is the same that users have come to know and love. It's extremely fast, good looking and offers a variety of options to viewers.

Uploads are very quick and the interface not only allows the user to upload multiple files at once, but has the option to add more files while an upload is in progress - nifty!

It's possible to sync Gallery with either Aperture or iPhoto but, in my opinion, there is one glaring sync error. Apple gives MobileMe users 20GB of storage to divide between email, iDisk, Gallery, and Backup. 20GB may seem like a lot but when all of these services are taken into account, the space goes fast. Ideally, MobileMe could offer users a complete cloud storage solution for all data. 20GB is simply not enough to accomplish that.

Following that logic, Apple should allow Gallery to use photos placed in the Pictures folder of iDisk. Not only would this ease the storage constraints, but it would simplify the interface between the two apps.

It's worth noting that Gallery has no photo editing capabilities or instant search. I don't think these are features that many users will miss, but as search is a key Apple technology and web-based photo editing is becoming more popular, it would have been nice for Apple to through those features in.

And that is as far as my complaints with Gallery go. It is otherwise and extremely well designed and extremely responsive app.

Calendar

Calendar isn't quite as slick as iCal, but it's still the slickest calendar interface I've seen to date. It has all the simplicity of gCal with fewer pages loads. (Less pages loaded means the app is faster.)

Notably, Calendar falls into the class of MobileMe apps that could use instant search and curiously doesn't have it.

While Calendar has no trouble syncing your iCal calendars, it does not import your subscription calendars. I can't fathom why this is, but it sure is annoying to not have holidays visible.

Aside from the different info panel (see photo, right), Calendar does maintain an interface virtually identical to iCal. This means that Calendar shares the same flaw that I find with iCal - it has poor support for ToDo items. As a simple list, ToDo is horribly uncomplicated and hard to use. There's no way to attach a todo to an event, one can't postpone todo items, and there is no method to group tasks with multiple calendars. Nonetheless, Calendar does what it's supposed to do elegantly and without trouble.

Contacts

Contacts should be the simplest app in the suite. Or at least, it makes sense to me that a simple database interface would be ease to do. …so of course, it fell to the bottom of the maintenance list.

My first sync (on Friday) caused some of my contacts to duplicate. I'm not sure why some duplicated and some didn't, but it was sure annoying and not what I expected from a first class sync app. Once I got that problem taken care of, I headed over to the webapp and tried dealing with my contacts there.

As with the rest of the me.com apps, Contacts online is very similar to contacts on the desktop. One glaring thing that is missing the smart contact groups. Normal groups show up online fine, but it's a strange thing to be missing when the instant search works so well. (whoohooo! instant search!)

One strange bug I encountered was that editing a contact name didn't always update the name in the contact list.

I won't say that Contacts is bad, far from it - it looks to be a promising web interface. But, it sure is buggy.

Mail

Let me start by saying this. I really prefer desktop apps for email – I want the ability to search and write messages while offline. To accomplish this, I use Apple's Mail.app. But, I've used Yahoo, AOL, gmail, Comcast, squirrel mail, and a host (20+?) of other email webapps.

Let me say this, for all it's simplicity and flash, the new MoblieMe email app sucks. I like the instant search, but aside from that, there are a lot of serious flaws.

Mail doesn't import other email accounts. The reason I so like Mail.app is that I can have a ton of email accounts in it. I've got 6 active right now. They all do different things and I don't want them confused. Now maybe I'm unique in that respect, but I still want Mail's web interface to show those other accounts. I was quite surprised to find that it didn't. After all, gmail does it.

Mail doesn't support smart folders. Not too much of a surprise in light of Contacts not supporting smart groups, but very disappointing. But, Mail has instant search!

New Message opens a popup. Really Apple? really? Didn't you learn anything from AOL's mistakes and Gmail's success? Lets keep everything in one window, mhhhkay?

New Message doesn't auto-complete the "To:" field. Granted, I ran into this problem when I clicked on the address book, but that doesn't indicate that auot-complete wasn't working. This seems to be an obvious feature that everybody uses.

I count myself lucky that I don't depend on me.com as my primary email. The webapp is easily the weakest in the suite, and needs quick updating.

Other nifty things

In general, the help provided is very good. Clicking on a help link or pressing [ctrl+?] launches a new popup (appropriate in this case) which loads faster than OSX help windows do!

I did all of my testing in Safari Version 3.1.1 (5525.20), so your mileage in a different browser may vary. I'm very interested to know how IE deals with me.com.

You can set me.com to remember who you are for 2 weeks at a time, a good security measure.

This is way improved over dotmac.

It's possible to setup your own domain name to point to your homepage. That means you can get your iWeb site to live at its own URL.

Users can set how they divide storage between their email and their iDisk –very handy!

Aside from where I specifically mentioned, the me.com is fast. Load times are negligible and speed should only increase as Apple works out the kinks.

**Syncing a computer **with MobileMe is similarly speedy, I could be mistaken, but it seemed snappier than the dotmac sync.

What I really think...

I'm horribly disappointed with iDisk. I really expected better from a cloud storage solution. For now, I'm sticking with Wua.la. I don't doubt that Apple will work out the kinks, but right now, it's broken.

Gallery, Contacts and Calendar are really nifty apps that are well done, but have several bugs.

Though usable, Mail needs a lot of work. Stick with gmail, Yahoo, or a desktop client.

Now for the million dollar question. Is it worth $100 a year?

• Do you need to host a website or share you pictures online, but have little technical know-how?
• Do you already have a dotmac email address?
• Do you want a really slick way of showing off your photos and videos?
• Do you need a really simple way to sync two computers?
• Do you want a set-it-and-forget-it strategy to get an offsite backup of your most essential data?

If you answered yes to any of the above, give me.com a serious think. Note I didn't ask if you need a way to get your calendar, or contacts, or email, or photos, or data, online. There are free solutions for all of these, they're just far more manual than MobileMe.

I really appreciate the approach of MobileMe. And incase you didn't catch it, the interface is slick! I trust that once all of the bugs are worked out, life @me will be really sweet.

A totally arbitrary rating, for those that need a number: 7.45/10

Update

AppleInsider raises an interesting point that I completely missed. MobileMe is marketed as a push solution for all your devices, and it fails at this goal. Though changes made on an iPhone are apparently recognized instantly by the cloud, changes made on a Mac still need to be synced. That is not a push solution, not at all. I suspect that the next version of OSX aliviate, if not fix this issue with support for exchange built into all the necessary apps. Nonetheless, it is a severe disappointment to not have push now – as was promised. Syncing is a 2nd class solution, especially when it duplicates my contacts!

Update 2

Check out this for a great look at how Apple is fixing the problem.

Needless to say, when the Media Industry found out, they were outraged. Several top papers had already run the image on their front pages, and their corrections were necessarily harsh on Iran.

Boing Boing had a different take. They asked their readers to submit a funny photoshopped version of the same phone. My (and their) favorite above. (click for more)

Paul E. Steiger, ProPublica editor-in-chief, stated: “We couldn’t be more pleased. With these stellar staff additions, ProPublica’s initial news staff of 28 will include seven Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters and editors.”

-ProPublica Announces Six More Staff Hires, Including Four Pulitzer Winners

Cheers to ProPublica!

I'm not one to just advertise anything that I see, but this is important. Watch the video above to see propaganda, or read the only text of the resolution below. But, please, sign the petition. It's quick, easy, and hey, you're doing the right thing.

Disapproving the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission with respect to broadcast media ownership.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Congress disapproves the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission relating to broadcast media ownership (Report and Order FCC 07-216), received by Congress on February 22, 2008, and such rule shall have no force or effect.

GovTrack.us: H. J. Res. 79

Sign the Petition

I look at Google, News Corp., TMZ, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and a host of other tools that have entered the online space; I not only applaud their success, but am engrossed with finding a solution to allow newspapers to match them.

Surely, newspapers, who are the very embodiment of news, journalism and act as society's information archive can find a way to adapt to this new medium?

The decline in advertising, fueled by a weak real estate market, has boosted the copy-to-ads ratio above the industry target of 50-50, giving readers more stories than they can digest, while the paper competes for attention with the Internet and TV, editor Russ Stanton said.

-LA Times to cut 250 jobs, including 150 news jobs: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Quotes like that don't give me any hope. Jeff Jarvis's post got me thinking. I am more aware of the troubles newspapers are facing than the vast majority of the US public. I care if they 'give a party' or not. But, that doesn't mean that the public would care.

Many newspapers are trying to adapt, but it's an uphill battle, especially when faced with corporate owners like Sam Zell. Some, like The Guardian are very attuned to the change and have a good shot at making it. Yet, there are so many smaller papers, with less resources that are struggling.

I'm a strong believer in the free market. If a product isn't up to standards, people will look elsewhere. My concern, is that the standards that journalists hold themselves to aren't valued by the US populace – who seem more interested in Paris Hilton and the latest sex scandals than what is actually happening in the world.

No matter that the next president of the US will affect their lives a lot more than Bardgelina's baby. If the demand is for infotainment, and not for journalism, then the supply of the former will increase at the detriment of the latter.

I'm not without hope yet, on the contrary, I think I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. I think that some major newspapers are starting to get 'it.' I think that some of the bad choices made now are going to put an end to the News Business and re-raise Journalism.

I value the Fourth Estate as a necessary part of our republic, and I trust that there is a minimum level of journalistic news and integrity that the US population demands. I trust that though the product may change, the market will correct itself – even if the supply needs to dip for a while.

Here's to the rise of the New Media, the hope that newspapers can find their place, and trust in the masses.

Both of these photos are part of similar articles about Senator Kennedy returning to the Senate for the first time after being diagnosed with brain cancer to vote on a new Medicare bill.

Of course, there's also this:

Yahoo and Getty Images said Tuesday that they have entered into a partnership under which Getty editors will comb Flickr in search of interesting images. They will then invite photographers to participate in the program and ensure that their images have the proper releases to be licensed legally. Those who are included in the program will get paid at the same rates that Getty pays photographers who are under contract with the company.

Great Photo on Flickr? Getty Images Might Pay You For It - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

Finally, a good reason to use flickr, perhaps even pay for a pro account!

While flickr has always been cool from a technology front, I've never really been encouraged to use it. In part, because I'm afraid my images might get stolen, and in part because I was never too keen on the 200 image maximum.

Now, from the unlikely source of Getty, who also runs iStockPhoto, Flickr has become a stock image site. iStockPhoto is very controversial because it does not pay photographers royalties and charges little for a purchase. Yet:

Getty also runs a site called iStockPhoto, where amateurs contribute photos that the company markets at lower rates. The photos on Flickr are of sufficent quality to demand higher prices, Mr. Klein said.

It seems that there is something to be said for the free market. iStockPhoto offers an inferior product. Here's the market correcting itself.

“Because the imagery is not shot for commercial services, there is more authenticity,” Mr. Klein said. “Advertisers are looking for authenticity.”

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE

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!

A really phenomenal panel discussion from some top dogs in the newspaper business that has a very optimistic view of newspapers online. Undoubtedly funding is the primary problem, but the subscription model seems to be favored.

Hicks narrates the show himself in a boring, monotone voice, and with some slow string music in the background. I'd have liked to hear more details like the escalator, but I do really like the choice to crop all photos wide and short.

The TrustE numbers cited by eMarketer said that only 12.6 percent of respondents said that more than a quarter of the targeted ads they were delivered were relevant. Ouch.

-Survey: Advertisers should acknowledge targeted ad concerns | The Social - CNET News.com

I was on facebook today (a rarity for me) and I happened to notice the ad to the right.

Yes, it's fairly creepy, but that wasn't what caught my eye. Notice the links below the ad? That "Advertise' link is fairly commonly found on sites, if you want to advertise through Facebook, click that and off you go. (By the way, Facebook makes it insanely simple to do that.)

But, the other links are, in my experience, rather unique. The "More Ads" link gets you to the full listing of ads that Facebook might provide you. Users can pick their own advertising. Nifty.

But wait, there's more!

Facebook also has those two nifty thumbs up/thumbs down buttons. Unfortunately I couldn't get them to work. I clicked on them multiple times on multiple browsers and nothing happened. But… I really like the idea.

Imagine a site (newspapers, listen up!) that targets advertising to users, in part, based directly on what they decide they want. The links should be simple and unobtrusive like Facebook's example.

Why would anybody bother to spend the time telling a site which ads they like (or more likely, which ads they don't like)?

Simple. The site can give them the reward of removing the ads they don't like -- completely.

If a user clicks on the 'thumbs down' button, the site shouldn't simply replace that ad with another. Give the user the incentive – remove the ad; remove the hole on the page that was made for it. Get rid of it completely, make it a sort of "sorry to bother you with that trash" message to the user.

Design

As a sidenote of sorts:

Facebook's ads are great in part because they all conform to a similar design standard that in turn conforms with the rest of the site. Facebook insures ads are un-obtrusive.

One common complaint about online ads that they are not nearly as "informative" as print ads are.

a recent survey of American consumers which found that more than three-quarters of respondents said online ads were more annoying than those in print.

-Hard sell - The Economist.com

In general people don't like flashy moving ads and prefer smaller, Google-like, text ads.

"Ironically, the one type of ads that really work on the Web are the small, text-only ads on search engines.

-New online ads squeeze news pages - CNet.com

Make online ads more like print

Therefore, online ads should be made to looks more like print ads. In my own, non-scientific observations of print newspaper ads, there's an obvious pattern that appears in print that does not appear online.

Print ads, generally, list prices, provide coupons, or tell the consumer when a sale is going to be. In contrast, online ads try to get you to make 'free money.' No wonder people prefer print.

The ads newspapers carry are necessarily focused on a local market. Fortunately, this is easy to replicate online.

Faulty logic

I recall watching a video (I can't remember where, otherwise I'd link to it), where an expert explained the newspaper advertising is struggling because of the way advertisers determine the total percentage of the site's visitors that might be interested in their ads.

The gentleman presented the following logic: if the San Francisco Chronicle has an online readership of 1 million, but only half live in the SF Bay Area, then a car dealership that wants to advertise on the paper's site assumes that their ads are only applicable to half of the paper's audience and therefore worth half as much.

This is ludicrous!

If the car dealership has places a print ad, it misses out on the the half million people who visit the site, but have no chance of seeing the print edition. The dealership has effectively doubled its audience.

Not only can the Newspaper offer a greater audience, but technology allows it to localize ads - automatically. If that dealership doesn't want to pay for ads that don't effect users outside the Bay Area, then the newspaper doesn't have to show that ad to the irrelevant users. Instead, they can find car dealerships that are applicable to their non-local users.

A theoretical step

I have no idea how much of the above is already done (or not done), but I here is a proposition for something that surely is not occuring.

A way to solve this problem:

Newspapers need to team up. Not in the media conglomeration sense, but in the Ohio sense. If national newspapers cooperated on advertising, a user from San Francisco visiting the NY Times site could still see advertising from that car dealership near San Francisco.

The NY Times can pocket the revenue and pay a small commission to The Chronicle for arranging the whole deal. The user gets relevant ads that are informative.

The key here is to provide relevant, local, ads that users find helpful, not gaudy.

Now there's a government that knows how to do PR.

I don't think I really have to write about this one. Just a question: What does this mean for social aggregators? Can they support 'real' journalism?

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

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.

The world's largest photo agency announced Wednesday that it has completed its deal to go private and will be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange at the end of the day.

Getty Images Sale Complete

There goes the Neighborhood?

It's possible, but for sure, this is just another example of a media conglomerate expanding its reach. It will be interesting to see if there is any policy shifts within Getty in the coming months.

This is really only funny if you've seen WallE, but it sure is funny.

...Until you start thinking about the sad truth about this site. The media industry is moving in this direction. This is an example of the ultimate media conglomerate. I'll leave it there before I get into a weird and far-fetched thought experiment.

There are several that I like, but the above image is my favorite. I have no idea where that lighting came from (graduated filters?), but it's rather perfect.

Tribune, meanwhile, told its employees Wednesday that it hoped to wring more value out of its "underutilized" real estate in Chicago and Los Angeles, extending an asset-selling program Tribune is pursuing to service a $13 billion debt load, much of which it took on from going private.

-Washington Times - In 'survival mode,' newspapers slashing jobs

Fantastic, the newspaper industry is in freefall. Selling assets just to cover your own costs is not a winning strategy. (I know, I played Railroad Tycoon ;) )

Looks like the Tribune Co. is especially in trouble.

As chilling as this may sound to some, TMZ could be the prototype of a 21st century news agency.

How TMZ uses tech to get in your face | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

For those that don't know, TMZ is premiere online celebrity gossip TV/magazine site. Picture People Magazine but with a lot of video.

C|Net of all folks posted an article that got me thinking about what TMZ has actually done to help new media.

Pure Opinion

TMZ's growing reputation as Hollywood's in-the-know and in-your-face news agency was built by working the phones, developing sources and basically out hustling rivals, say executives.

Full disclosure: I really dislike TMZ. The morality of TMZ is questionable. They are nothing more than paparazzi and fully admit to shoving their cameras into celebrities' faces, and "hustling" to get their stories.

"You can't go around with big cameras, a sound guy, and a multiple-person crew," Paratore said. "You need a smaller footprint. It's all about being a fly on the wall."

Like all paparazzi, they make it harder for journalists who have more important issues to report.

Also, I just don't care about what TMZ is reporting. I know this makes me a bit of an oddity in the Western world. But I don't give a shit about Britney's latest hook-up or Brangelia's babies.

Honestly. I don't give a damn, and wish we could get the 'real' media back on track.

Sidenote: I'm still undecided on the value of 'infotainment.' I think that it's largely a bad thing, but there is something to be said for the business tactic.

end rant

What TMZ Got Right

They're doing things on the cheap; buying professional instead of industrial solutions. Why buy a custom built editing platform? A few high-end Macs will do the trick. Huge, do-it-all video cameras? Why? Shoot HD from a prosumer level camera. It's just going to go on the web.

They went with an all digital workflow. Always a smart move. It's better, cheaper, faster.

Better: Smaller video cameras let them do "guerilla-style" journalism. All-digital workflow lets them update archives and such with one button. Not to mention accessing old footage for research is a snap.

Cheaper: Digital workflow reduces overhead. Buying professional workstations and prosumer cameras seriously reduced initial costs.

Faster: Again, the digital workflow. Smaller cameras let them go into the field with one person instead of a 5 man crew.

Basically, go TMZ for showing how New Media is an accomplishable task.

Nikon announces D700 full-frame DSLR

Nikon D700

Sweet! Nikon has introduced a new DSLR. The Nikon D700. Basically, it's a D300 with full frame! It's the same sensor as the D3, so we get all of the low light goodness with the smaller footprint of the D300 body. Oh! and the dust reduction too!

Also see DPreview or KenRockwell.

sb-900 Flash

In addition to the new DSLR, Nikon has updated their high-end flash unit a bit. The new stuff:

• 25% fast recycle times (good improvement, not fantastic),* no need for a fifth battery (awful nice),* more intelligent computer (should help a bit)* more powerful (nice, not necessary)* $500 cost (36% price increase)

Also see DPreview.

PC Lenses

Two new PC-correction lenses at 45mm and 85mm. Both at f/2.8. Both at roughly $1800.

Nikon now has 24mm, 45mm, and 85mm PC correction lenses. That's a much better range than a sole 85mm, which was an awful lot of telephoto on a D2x. Shame they're all so expensive.

Sidenote: Seems like the new price point for glass is $1800. The 14-24mm, 24-70mm, as these two are all priced right around there. What a bummer. I much preferred the $1300 standard of the 70-200mm and 17-35mm.

Also see DPreview.

"I can continue to ask the tough questions."

Tom Brokaw, Meet the Press Jun 29, 2008, while interviewing Arnold Schwarzenegger

I've been listening to NBC's Meet the Press via podcast for about two years. In conjunction with CBS's Face the Nation I feel like I can get a pretty good taste for what the coming political issues of the week will be. (This coming week: more of the same election coverage.)

Russert Did This:

I've never really been a loyal listener. I miss a week as often as I listen to a show, and I frequently listen on my iPod, while traveling somewhere, so my attention to the finer points may be a bit lacking.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed listen to Tim Russert on the program because I found the he would frequently demand answers to his questions – a value that many broadcast journalists don't seem to share. Politicians are infamous for not giving real answers to questions that hit too close to home. The fact that Russert didn't seem to drink the Kool-aid (too often) was an admirable quality in a broadcast journalist.

With Russert's recent death, the understanding seems to be the Tom Brokaw will take over moderating duties. This week was the first that Meet the Press was introduced without Tim Russert's name attached, and the first that Brokaw sat in Russert's chair.

Brokaw Did This:

As the presumptive successor to the program Brokaw picked an interesting format. Perhaps necessitated by his other reporting duties, the broadcast was shot at the Western Governor's Convention instead of the Meet the Press studio in D.C.

Admitedly, Brokaw is a new to the program, and undoubtedly there will be a settling-in period. Nonetheless, his style differed dramatically from Russert's.

His opening interview with the Democratic governor's of Wyoming and Colorado consisted mainly of softball questions and very few quotes were used (Russert was famous for doing this). His interview with the Republican governor of California had some hard questions, but Brokaw never really pressed when Arnold Schwarzenegger evaded answering.

Lastly, Brokaw's 'final word' was nothing more than a notice that we'll have to wait two weeks to see him again (due to the tennis championships). At least he ended with "If it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press."

Therefore…

I know it was only week one, but I'm not looking forward to Meet the Press under Brokaw. He doesn't seem to have the knack for tough interviews that Russert was so known for.

Bummer.

View this week's Meet the Press

I certainly can't tell one penguin from another, and if software can do that, think of the implications. Imagine a computer that knows, and can automatically keyword photos based on who's in them. Just tell the computer once, who someone is, and you're good to go.

Mr. Fox said that Google’s approach was different from what Yahoo, AOL and others call behavioral targeting. Those companies look at what a user did a few days earlier to show them ads about the same topic today. Google says it believes that search engine advertising is most effective if it relates to what the user has most recently searched for.

“We are trying to understand what the user is trying to do right now,” Mr. Fox said. “In some cases, those queries are ambiguous, so you need a little more context.”

Google Tries Tighter Aim for Web Ads - NYTimes.com

Google being smart yet again. This is what everyone should be doing.

In the same way that if I'm reading the sports section of the paper, I want to see ads about golf balls, I don't want to see ads for photo equipment when I'm searching for movie times.

Cheers to Google.

CBS is claiming its first amendments rights to keep the footage unseen. The military is arguing that there may be footage that helps to incriminate the soldier and it should be seen by the court.

Obviously, the military is looking for a confession that the soldier may have given on tape. CBS is stuck in an awkward position. The soldier is clearly guilty, the only questions are how much guilt does he bear and how much can be proven. It's quite possible that CBS obtained an interview with the soldier only on the basis that it not air certain parts, and/or promises were made after-the-fact.

Regardless, CBS has claimed that isn't required to turn over it's excess footage because of its constitutionally guaranteed free press rights.

This footage is the equivalent of a print journalist's notes. In that it is information that was obtained from a source but not published.

Unfortunately, the US does not have a good history of protecting journalists, especially when the government is the opponent in a court of law. Yet, it is important for the government to recognize the necessity of the fourth estate (this administration does not, one example).

As much as the soldiers involved in the Haditha Massacre need to be punished, it is not okay for the military to subvert journalist's rights to get the evidence that they need.

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.

Bing also brings up a few points that he doesn't address in this list. He argues that both Rupert Murdoch and Sam Zell have recently bought major newspapers: the Wall Street Journal and the Tribune Co. respectively. These industry titans must be investing in newspapers for a reason.

→ Mr. Bing, I agree, they are investing for a reason. The news business will not die. There is an inherent need for the fourth estate; both for the sake of democracy and human curiosity. These rather smart business men are simply buying low so they can sell high.

Bing writes that his kids love reading newspapers; he hints that there is a need for something physical for a younger person to be able to understand it.

→ If Bing is arguing that his kids won't be able to satisfy their "obamamania" without newspapers, he's wrong. They can always get their news online. Faster. From more sources. More reliably – will they look to a newspaper to see who won on November 8th? More likely they will keep track of the election night online. Or at least on TV.

As to the need for something physical, that is a problem. So far, we have nothing better than print newspapers as a physical medium. Trust me, solutions are being worked on though. I like OLEDs.

Advertising dollars are down across the board, and according to Bing, and all the bad press that newspapers are getting means that advertisers are being scared away.

→ There's bad press for a reason. The media industry can be pretty stupid. Yet, I trust them enough to report that part of the industry is failing only if it actually is failing.

Ads may be down across the board, and that might partially explain the loss of ad revenue for newspapers, but there's no way the overall decrease is responsible for the drastic losses that newspapers are seeing. They've lost their crown jewel of advertising, the classifieds, to the internet. An overall slump in the graph should not equal a valley for the newspaper industry.

I've got a bad habit of not being able to read the vocal inflections that people try to convey with text, so I apologize if I've taken any of what Gill wrote too literally. However, the point is important, the print medium is dying. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that technology is not ready yet with a replacement. In the mean time, newspapers have to find a stop gap solution where they can exist online and still maintain a physical product.

According to [Randy] Michaels [COO, Tribune Co.], there should be an equal number of pages devoted to advertising and pages devoted to reporting and opinion. "What you find out is that you can take 500 editorial pages a week out of [a] newspaper and have a 50-50 ad-content ratio."

A brilliant new scheme for measuring the productivity of journalists. - By Michael Kinsley - Slate Magazine

The Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times (among other newspapers), has announced two bad ideas at once. The first is a new standard to measure journalist efficiency: column inches. The second: reduce cost by shrinking the size of papers while increasing the number of ads printed.

Journalistic Efficiency

"This is a new thing. Nobody ever said, 'How many column inches did someone produce?'"

Randy Michaels

The idea of being able to measure the productivity of a worker has always been a fascination of mine. The concept is very interesting –- a mathematical way of determining not only who is good at their jobs, but how many workers you need. As great as the idea is for employers, there's a problem: it just doesn't work very well.

Most companies who employ this management style use complex algorithms that measure a variety of variables to determine job performance. They take everything from the time you arrive at work to the number of people you have working under you into account. The Tribune's idea of using column inches as the main (only?) measurement of the efficiency of an employee is ridiculous.

Aside from that, The Tribune Company suffers another problem with their new standard: their measurement encourages the precise opposite of efficiency. An efficient journalist is one that can quickly and accurately report a story. To be a good journalist, you have to be able to write/present the story well. As writing more is neither quicker or more accurate, and as good writing is not verbose, the new standard promotes bad journalism (or at least bad writing, and are the two terms that different?)

The News Business

The Tribune's second command, to shrink the news hole, is might make a paper more profitable, but it certainly won't promote better journalism.

If the average Los Angeles Times journalist produces 51 pages a year, as Michaels has calculated, this means that a 50-50 ratio will allow him to lay off 500 Los Angeles Times journalists, which is more than half of the current staff. Then, if he can persuade the remaining Los Angeles Times journalists to raise their productivity from 50 pages to 300 pages a year, he can dismiss five-sixths of the rest. That would leave something like 50 journalists to put out the Los Angeles Times every day.

A brilliant new scheme for measuring the productivity of journalists.

“The problem is the papers aren’t producing ad revenue, and diminishing the journalism isn’t going to solve that." said Jim O'Shea.

The Tribune Company is facing a problem: they're not as profitable as they'd like to be, their solution is nonetheless wrong. Profitability will not improve by reducing the quality of the product. It leads to severe long-term problems. Not to mention violates the moral obligations of the Fourth Estate.

So criticize The New York Times for its bogus trend stories, questionable judgment, or occasional acts of plagiarism. But please don’t accuse it of skimping on the news.

-VF Daily: The Incredible Shrinking New York Times?: Online Only: vanityfair.com

Their findings were in line with an article by the public editor of the Times. Who professed not to like the recent design changes to the Times, but to appreciate the Times insistence that the content was unchanged. "The new front-page index is a big improvement, but I find the design of the expanded one inside jarring. ... The items in the new index float in a sea of white space, looking light and inconsequential." Clark Hoyt wrote.

The design changes might have been a bit "drastic" but surely must be welcomed. They give the paper a more modern design which it desperately needed. If print newspapers are going to survive, they need to become a product based on something beside delivering news. Design will obviously play a key roll. The web has taught the media a few lessons on how people navigate their news. Reflecting those lessons in print is a smart, forward thinking approach.

Maintaining the size of the news hole is an impressive feat. True, they cut out a few pages of stock quotes, but who cares? The idea of getting stock quotes from a newspaper is almost ludicrous nowadays anyway. Cheers to the Times for leading the media industry by example.

Sidenote: It sure would be interesting to compare the amount of the news hole devoted to investigative journalism, celebrity gossip, spot news, international news, etc. It also might be interesting to do this research with other papers. (WaPo, LA TImes, Chicago Tribune, etc.)

The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn't photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren't being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn't known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about -- the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 -- no photography.

Bruce Schneier: Are photographers really a threat? | Technology | The Guardian

What an interesting and valid point: terrorists aren't photographers.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that photographers aren't terrorists. Bruce Schneier's main point is that, "If we spend a zillion dollars defending Wimbledon and terrorists blow up a different sporting event, that's money wasted." There's an obvious flaw in this logic: the money isn't wasted, it worked. No attack on Wimbledon meant the protection put in place did the job it was there to do.

Sidenote: In the US, law enforcement and the military can stop you from taking photographs of certain things. i.e. bridges, nuclear power plants, the UN, etc.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a photographer. I've been stopped numerous times (by both public and private security) and asked to stop photographing. In every case, I was within my rights, and the officer had no right to stop me (though UK stop-and-search laws are rather annoying).

I'm no terrorist, and I do often struggle to see how pictures that I'm taking when I'm stopped could have helped a terrorist, nonetheless, if security experts think that photographs might stop an attack, then I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and allow them to question people taking photographs. It seems to be a reasonable approach. As long as that remains their limit, then I am willing to continue being annoyed in the name of security.

This is something that I (and I'm sure many others) have been struggling with for a while. I own a boatload of devices; several computers, portable devices, and such; all of which I want to stay in sync. I've got a theoretical solution to the problem which I'll detail below.

Jon Stoke's article points out several obvious problems: there is currently no easy way to sync your data, the stop-gap solutions that exist now are poorly done and anything but set-and-forget, and that computers should be very good at performing a simple repetitive task (just like syncing files). However, Stokes forgets to tackle on important issue. Yes, I want my data to be the synced across all my devices. It's horribly inconvenient to have to deal with multiple versions of files and its a tragedy when I realize that the file that I need is not on the machine that I'm working on right now. Yet, the data that I want on each device is not identical.

The bigger issue

For instance, I've got a rather large iTunes library. Last I checked, it's over 115GB. It lives happily on my desktop which has more than enough storage available to handle that amount of frivolous data happily. The obvious problem is that I do not want all that music on my laptop which only has a 80GB hard drive, and it certainly won't all fit on my iPod Nano.

Or, take my photo library. It's as large as my music library and then some. I do want some of it on my laptop: current work, my portfolio, the images I have up on my site; but some random shoot from 3 years ago? There's no need to carry that with me (at least until SSD reach multi-terabyte capacities).

Solution

The problem is not that I need a solution to have all my data all the time. If I did or could, the solution would be fairly easy – the technology to sync two equally sized devices together already exists. No, the problem is that I want certain data to go to certain devices and not to others. My solution, and suggestion for those that can make this happen is this:

1. Time Machine by Apple is a ready-made solution for syncing to devices. It already syncs one hard drive with versions itself. It can even do it across a network. All that needs to be done is to transition it from a backup utility to a sync utility. I'm no engineer, but I don't imagine it would be a very hard task to accomplish. Especially if you consider the underling technology behind time machine.
2. As Stokes suggests, the 'drive' paradigm is very cumbersome once you get more than a couple of hard drives floating around. Changing this to the 'cloud paradigm would be fantastic.Think about it like this: Google has tons (literally) of hard drives in their servers which provide the space for them to provide all their services to their millions of users. But as a user, you have no idea where your data is actually physically stored. It's somewhere, but you don't actually know where your gmail emails are stored, nor do you care.Introducing a similar solution at the personal level is a logical evolution. No, it's not really applicable to the 'average user' who only has a laptop and perhaps one external hard drive, but for small businesses or power users it could be a god-send.Again, I'm no engineer, but I imagine it working something like this:

You're home has a network setup, or at least one computer that is 'cloud-aware.' When you plug a drive into the system for the first time, it will ask you if you'd like to make this disk a part of the cloud – akin to the way Time Machine asks if you'd like to make a new disk a time machine backup drive. This is to ensure that portable storage (like a hard drive that's meant to travel with your laptop, or a flash card) won't get data stored on them that belongs in the cloud.

Once configured, the cloud would be just be similar to a RAID 5 array. It handles all of your backup for you, it presents itself as one drive, if you unplug a drive from the system, or one dies, the cloud automatically compensates – all without you worrying about it.

Furthermore, the cloud is accessible to all of your devices. It's online, so if you have a password, you can get your data anywhere. Think, Back to My Mac, but simpler. If your device is connected to the Internet, it automatically connects to your cloud.

Not into dealing with a mess of hard drives? Perhaps third-party companies can offer cloud storage for a price. Amazon and Google (among others) are already perfectly positioned to do this. Apple's iDisk already offers an omni-present storage space, and approaches this paradigm.

Cloud storage can help to solve many of the syncing problems, your data is always accessible, no matter where you are. 3. There is one glaring disadvantage though – what if you're offline? Or what if the files are huge and would take too long (even over broadband) to access remotely?Here's where my solution gets a new twist.I propose a new kind of metadata that I'll call 'Locality.'

Every file has metadata attached to it. It's how the computer knows what date it was created, who last opened it, etc... What I'm proposing is an addition that keeps track of what devices a file is supposed to be stored on. All of your devices will know about all of your other devices. Your smartphone, iPod, laptop, DVR, desktop, and so on, will all know that each other exist. That way, they will be able to automatically keep track of what data is supposed to be on each device – automatically.

The 'Save' dialog in every OS functions basically the same. It asks you what you want to name the file, where you want to put it, and the file type. A system that is 'locality-aware,' would ask you one more thing: which devices you want your data on. It could for instance, default to storing everything on your cloud. If you're offline, then it stores the file locally, until you can connect. However, the user can also decide which other devices get the data stored locally – in other words – you can decide right in a save dialog where you want to always access your data.

For example, If you're saving a new Word (or Pages) document, you can set it to save on your cloud and also go to your smartphone. The next time your computer comes in to contact with either your smartphone or your cloud, it sends that file off. That way if your smartphone contacts your cloud (more likely that it contacting your laptop) it gets the file right away.

The advantage to this system is that you can decide to keep a huge library of pictures safely on your cloud. Where it can be accessed by any of your devices, but isn't stored on them, so space isn't an issue. If you choose, however, you can tell any of your locality-aware devices to set the locality of a file however you choose. You can set some songs to go to your desktop and your iPod, but not to your smartphone.

Apple is most likely going to rebrand .Mac, mostly likely calling it "mobile me." In theory, it will tie the iPhone more closely to Mac computers via a cloud interface. Who knows, maybe Apple is on the right track.

I seriously doubt that Apple will present a solution as complete as what I've just suggested. I'm certain that my solution requires a re-wiring of an OS. Nonetheless, here's hoping that it's a step in the right direction.

Interesting to note:

• The conference is put in association with the Wall Street Journal, which Murdoch Owns.
• The interviewers are presumably employees of Murdoch.
• Most of the questions are fairly soft, but there are a couple that have a point to them.

"If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq," the former spokesman writes. "The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

Bush's Former Spokesman Scorches White House with Tell All Memoir | MediaCulture | AlterNet

The more that comes out, the more it becomes obvious what the failure of the press means. High level government officials broke the law. They've lied (hey, look at that I used the 'L' word) and not been held accountable. Furthermore, no one's held the press accountable.

Come to think of that… who is the press answerable to? What's the check/balance for them? The people?

I'll leave this at "food for thought" before it becomes a rant.

Update:

The press is giving this story a fantastic spin.

The media has decided to cover this story, by getting a reaction from the ... White House. I guess when in doubt, turn to the administration to see what they have to say.

Coverage could have swayed toward other former-administration insiders who have also publicly talked about the administration's lies, but instead the media went with interviews from administration officials who said McClellan is "misguided for him to make these kind of broad accusations and draw these big conclusions about the president."

Here's a link to the NY Times more balanced coverage.

Apparently, the tie-in with the AF system works very well, which allows you to compose your picture first, then auto-focus. This is much improved over the auto-focus in the center, then compose system that every other camera has depended on.

Surprise, surprise; Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

Part of the agency’s case hinges on 18 documents listed in the report and presented to Iran that, according to Western intelligence agencies, indicate the Iranians have ventured into explosives, uranium processing and a missile warhead design — activities that ordinarily would be associated with constructing nuclear weapons.

-Nuclear Agency Accuses Iran of Willful Lack of Cooperation - NYTimes.com

I recently wrote a paper on the Iranian nuclear problem – the argument was severely hurt by a report from the US intelligence community stating that Iran had stopped work on nuclear weapons in 2003. Well, here's to US 'intelligence:'

“The Iranians are certainly being confronted with some pretty strong evidence of a nuclear weapons program and they are being petulant and defensive,” said David Albright, a former weapons inspector who now runs the Institute for Science and International Security. “The report lays out what the agency knows and it is very damning. I’ve never seen it laid out quite like this.”

Actually, I can tie this back to the press. Let's talk about bias in the media. Take a moment to read this excerpt from the first article:

A National Intelligence estimate published last December by American intelligence agencies concluded that Iran suspended its work on a weapons design in late 2003, in response apparently to mounting international pressure,** adding that it wasn’t certain whether the weapons work had resumed**.

The agency’s report highlights the amount of work still to be done before definitive conclusions about the nature of the program can be made, a task that the agency-associated official said would require months.

[Bolding applied]

When this news was first broken, the New York Times' coverage took a stance directly contradictory. There was little mention the surety of the government towards the restarting of the program. The focus was entirely about the stopping of the nuclear program in 2003. Here's the lead from the article:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

-U.S. Says Iran Ended Atomic Arms Work - NYTimes.com

Though the article does go on to quote, "that intelligence agencies 'do not know whether it [Iran] currently intends to develop nuclear weapons,'" the news coverage at the time hardly focused on that angle. There is a bit of revisionist history here. The media has a bad tendency to focus on the sensational. If the NIE was inconclusive enough to say that it was not sure what the current status of the Iranian nuclear program was, then that should have been the focus of the reporting. Using the 'stopped in five years ago' angle is either poor reporting or dishonesty.

The second bolding from the excerpt is just another complaint I have about the whole international nuclear process/angencies/bumbling: It's been years since Iran started to develop nuclear weapons (clearly prior to 2003). It sounds like we've got pretty solid evidence that they're violating some rules:

• "The agency also said that during a visit in April, it was denied access to sites where centrifuge components are being manufactured and where research of uranium enrichment is being conducted."
• "The report makes no effort to disguise the agency’s frustration with Iran’s lack of transparency. It describes, for example, Iran’s installation of new centrifuges, known as the IR-2 and IR-3 (for Iranian second and third generations) and other modifications at its sprawling site at Natanz, as 'significant, and as such should have been communicated to the agency.'"

I'm unclear. What's going to take "months" to do? I don't get it; Iran is clearly in violation of the rules/international law. What's stopping someone from doing something about it?

Ashley Gilbertson, a freelance photographer who has covered the war for Newsweek, Time and The New York Times and has written about covering the conflict in a book called “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” will be going back to Iraq in June. It will be his sixth time there, temperatures will range up to 130 degrees, and each time he has gone back there have been new restrictions.

“Many of my colleagues have turned away from the story because it has gotten to the point where they feel they just aren’t going to get anything useful, which I completely understand,” he said, adding that nonetheless, when the surge ends this summer, he wants to be there to chronicle what follows.

-The Media Equation - The Wars We Choose to Ignore - NYTimes.com

David Carr, for The New York Times, wrote this excellent piece about the abysmal state of press coverage of the war in Iraq. Weaving in some fantastic personal reminders that the War is indeed still going on, Carr reminds the rest of Americans that on Memorial Day we ought to think long and hard about "a war that had cost thousands of lives and over $1 trillion" all the while loosing "news salience."

According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index, coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has slipped to 3 percent of all American print and broadcast news as of last week, falling from 25 percent as recently as last September.

“Ironically, the success of the surge and a reduction in violence has led to a reduction in coverage,” said Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “There is evidence that people have made up their minds about this war, and other stories — like the economy and the election — have come along and sucked up all the oxygen.”

This, is of course, just another example of the poor state of the Fourth Estate in this country. Carr is far from the first person to voice this concern and is probably not the most eloquent to do so, but the point still stands: the news media needs to do their job. It needs to report on the government and the war. Ratings, which are nothing more than poll results, ought to come secondary to the primary purpose of the news industry - to give news to the people. Yes, the media does in fact have a higher moral obligation that it is required to fulfill.

Furthermore, I don't buy the argument that there is nothing happening and therefore nothing to report. We manage to fill the airwaves with 24 hours of 'news' occurring in this country. Surely there is just as many stories to be told in not one, but two war zones!?

If the government is restricting access, then get around them. That's the job of the Fourth Estate: to uncover the things the government is trying to hide.

No doubt, reporting in a war zone in dangerous. Especially in the Middle East where kidnapping journalists has become a standard practice. Undoubtedly, having protection of US troops is a huge comfort and an increase in safety.

No trip outside the Green Zone is remotely safe. The enemy lurks everywhere among the population. Attackers show no mercy for innocent bystanders, who commonly outnumber intended targets. Each mission carries the threat of roadside bombs, suicide attacks by explosives-packed cars and trucks, and ambushes by insurgents.

-The Deadly Game of Private Security - The New York Times

Yet, I have to wonder if the press can't resort to the same tactics that the US military is resorting to – private military contractors. Surely someone can figure out how to not be as reliant (or complacent) as the press apparently is on the US government to tell them what to cover and where they can cover it from.

CNN	FOX	NYT	WaPo
Lead: China quake	Lead: Mars lander	Lead: Midwest storms	Lead: China aftershock
Nothing on Iraq or Afghanistan	Nothing on Iraq or Afghanistan	2 articles about Iraq, both small and buried	3 tertiary articles (fairly prominent) about related issues, 1 buried link

Shocking. The broadcast media has nothing about the war, while the print media carries a few stories.

While there is no question that the First Amendment protects coverage of spot-news events in public places, it is also clear that private events may be legally controlled by their organizers. Organizers may say who may or may not attend. They may also require that attendees agree to certain conditions.

Journalists are equally free to decline to agree and simply stay away.

Your Right$ Vs. Their Right$ Right? - The Digital Journalist

Good advice to photographers – beware what you agree you can('t) do with your images when shooting an event. The obvious problem for journalists is that standing on higher moral ground isn't really an option. If you don't shoot an event, someone else will, and they'll have the published photos to prove it.

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.

…we hear countless calls for help from these newspaper photographers who have made the jump, as their employers – who although they have heeded the call to move to video, don't understand what it takes to do this skill – are beating them down.

So here are the rules. Please pass these on to your editors and publishers:

How Not To Do Newspaper Video - The Digital Journalist

The Digital Journalist claims to be "the first publication to start talking about how newspapers would need to migrate their brand to the Web, and the key element was going to be with video."

I'm not sure how true that is, but their list of rules for video on a newspaper website is quite good. They are in brief (with my summary and commentary):

1. You are not in the television business. A TV reporter can do 4 or more stories a day because they have hundreds of people back at the station supporting them. Photogs have to edit all their own pieces, their only support staff is an editor who is trained to look at a collection of still images and pick the best – they're no help with video. Don't expect a Photog to be able to turn in the quality of work of a TV station.My input: ...which is why we need a support staff back at the paper. The WaPo and (I think) the NYT do something like this already. Far more importantly however, is the point that Newspaper photogs shouldn't be trying to produce the same reports that TV does. They can be more quirky, insightful, and (frankly) cooler than a TV report. TV has their domain – they're very good at it. Newspapers, if they're going to survive in the moving picture business need a new and different draw. This can and should be a photographer's 'creative' approach to their report.

Photogs have been trying to find that new an different angle for as long as there have been PJs, bring that same ingenuity to video and new media.

2. Video is a craft. It can take weeks to come up with a good video piece – it's just more work than still images are.My input: Oh how true and under-appreciated that is. Video takes a lot more time for many reasons (you have to download in real-time, you have to edit in slower than real-time, you have to deal with timing to the milisecond, you have to deal with audio, etc...). If pictures are like 2D, than movies are something like 4D. It's a lot more work and requires a lot of training.

True, knowing photography is a big help when you're on scene shooting – both videography and photography require an understanding of light and composition. And there, the similarity ends, video deals with movement in a whole new way. Not to mention, you have to worry about sound. The list goes on...

3. Do not think shovelware. Newspaper can't just take footage from a TV station and put it on their website. The TV new report exists for the 45 seconds it's on the air, and then is never seen again. The new media video is accessible online for eternity. Newspapers have the time available to them to present more well-researched, developed pieces.My input: Well said. Newspapers have the opportunity to present a new and better type of video. Simply rebranding TV footage (or doing a TV-like report) is foolish. You can't beat TV at their own game, invent a new one.
4. Do not be intimidated by your bean counters. Forget ROI. Video gets goodwill.My input: Oh how true. Video is going to be a costly endeavor for any newspaper to embark on. New equipment, training, and staff are necessary – forget about it. Aside from the "goodwill" video gets you, it's the future. You can try to save money now, but you'll be closing you're doors in five years.

Counter-intutive? You bet. Here's the deal: digital FX guys need something to base a lot of their work on. (Same way it's easier to modify a picture in photoshop then try to draw it by hand.) Photographers then are needed to create hiRes digital panoramics of scenes that the FX guys will later use to create movies, like Speed Racer.

Prior to delivering his speech, Robbins announced that he had indeed prepared his keynote, but the higher-ups might not be willing to let him deliver it. A moderator then came on stage and explained that Robbins' speech was controversial to say the least. The audience response of "free speech, free speech" ensured that Robbins quickly retook the podium.

TV that instills fear, obsession with sex-scandals, focus on right vs. left politics, and infotainment were all subjects on which Robbins justly attacked the media. While some of these criticisms left the room quiet, most of Robbins' cleverly worded speech had them laughing, a bit nervously, at themselves.

...let's stay focused on Sex Scandals. Stop with the in-depth reporting that gets outside of the sound bite. More sex scandals! Surely with a little more prying, a little more effort we can find more sexual deviants. And trust me, sexual deviancy is something we can all agree on. It's deliciously intoxicating to watch unfold. It's titillating. The absolute zenith of news, the perfect storm of reporting, the shining city on the hill in news coverage was Lewinsky vs. Clinton. Now that was fun. We couldn't get enough of that. There were salacious details, semen stains, oral sex. And the president lied.

The Power and Responsibility of our Nation's Broadcasters - The Digital Journalist

Robbins' speech is a beautiful example of someone saying what needs to be said to the right group of people in the right manner at the right time. It's obviously unclear if his heartfelt plea for better and more responsible programing will be implemented. Nonetheless, cheers to Tim Robbins for his courageous and well spoken words. Hear the audio at The Huffington Post Read another take at The Digital Journalist

It was inevitable, but YouTube has joined the ranks of CNN, FOX, CBS, and [Neighborhood

America](http://www.neighborhoodamerica.com/) in calling for the average citizen to submit their own news stories.

Thanks to better, cheaper, and easier access to video equipment, there's an amazing amount of news being reported on YouTube every single day by citizens in all corners of the globe. You're conducting interviews with local community leaders, doing weekly reports on the latest campus news for your school television station, and investigating untold stories you think the world should know about. This stuff is fantastic, but we want to see more from you all and to bring more citizen journalists into the fold.

-Meet the new YouTube News Manager

Ars Techina reports:

Already the Citizen News channel has subscribed to over 70 of YouTube's citizen journalists who are reporting on various issues and niches. "Texascountryreporter," for example, covers "the backroads of Texas to find the people and places who make the Lone Star State one-of-a-kind." "TheRealNews" is a "global online video news network" with impressive production values, boasting "thousands of $10 donations" from users around the world.

-News unfiltered: YouTube embraces citizen journalism

Personally, I have yet to decide if citizen journalism is a good thing for the Media Industry. On the one hand, more people involved in the Fourth Estate is undoubtedly a good thing, especially considering the political landscape of today. On the other, it feel like a cop out for professional journalists to lazily allow the public to do their jobs for them.

As another example, consider the template:

{Location}-{Country}-{State}-{City}-{Caption} for a photo that has “Location” and “Caption”, but no “Country,” “City,” or “State.”. Assuming that location and caption are “Home” and “Having Fun” respectively, it becomes:

Home-Having Fun which is better than it would be without these special rules:

Home----Having Fun

Jeffrey Friedl’s Blog » Preset Templates in My Lightroom Plugins

Sweet!!! This is a much need addition to Adobe Lightroom. The current ability to place metadata fields just about anywhere is very cool, but poorly implemented. It appears that Mr. Friedl has managed to fix this inadequacy – I'd love to see his solution made into a plugin that any other plugin can call / see Adobe adopt it.

The article, entitled: 'Star Wars' is My Co-Pilot is a Q&A of the weirdest and wackiest coverage that I have ever seen on a major news site. Be sure to check out the disappointingly short, but fantastic video they published with the story. Cheers to TIME for covering (and publishing) this fantastically off-beat story.

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

This is a great clip about what web 2.0 is – from an academic (but still very exciting) point of view.

“We aim to produce an excellent newspaper out of the region” that will set a new standard for other publications to aspire to, said Hassan M. Fattah, the deputy editor, who was a correspondent for The New York Times in the Middle East before joining The National. “Being government-owned does not equal being government-run,” he said. “There are no ministers sitting in my office” telling the paper what to write.

-A New Mideast Paper Vows to Be Different - New York Times

Abu Dhabi has a new, free newspaper – despite being owned by the crown prince (and therefore the government) So far so good, today's front page of their website had a story about rock quarries producing too much dust for government standards. The story not quite an exposè – it's actually not even new news, and the story doesn't specify the government's role in the matter beyond saying that the judiciary has already ruled on the matter. However, it is a good issue to call attention to, and good to see on a front page of a newspaper that's trying to separate itself from the government.

Already, the paper has attracted some serious competition: on Monday, The Financial Times of London said that it was introducing a new edition for the Middle East, with editorial offices based in Abu Dhabi.

Abu Dhabi is one of the more westernized countries in the Middle East, and things look good so far, but it's definitely a 'wait and see' case.

…and it is still possible to spend months in the jungle and come back with amazing photos. See here for more.

These truths are self-evident, but we still try to keep up appearances. It's bad for business to admit you are a pinhead, even if the polls clearly show that the American people have not been fooled. So each year, nearly three thousand Beltway tribe members and their guests gather at the Washington Hilton, the place where Ronald Reagan got shot, to dine with the current president of the United States and pretend for a night that we actually belong to a cool crowd, a hip scene, an exclusive network of movers and shakers that everyone wants to join.

-The Coolest D.C. Party is Still Lame - TIME

What a very well written, truthful article by Micahael Scherer. I'm not sure if the commentary is more directed at the Washington politicians or the journalists, but wow. This is the most truthful thing to come out of this shindig since Stephen Colbert did his routine there in 2005.

UPDATE: The New York Times has apparently decided that "that the media-politician chumminess is unseemly and maybe even borderline unethical."

I don’t think one can downplay the significance of Mark’s departure because the contribution he made to the development of Photoshop and Lightroom has certainly been enormous and it goes without saying that his presence will be missed at Adobe. 

-LightroomNews » Blog Archive » Mark Hamburg leaves Adobe

I've heard of Mr. Hamburg before, and know him to be a prime instigator behind a lot of Adobe's success.

As for what Mark is going to do next, it is known that he is now going to Microsoft in Seattle, and that his future work there won’t involve digital imaging, but instead be focussed on the “user experience”. So remember Jeff’s advice and be careful what you wish for!

That I didn't know (unsurprisingly). All I can say is… godspeed Mark, may Redmond treat you well. (though I have my doubts).

UPDATE: I re-read this post the morning after I wrote it.

NOTE-TO-SELF: Proofread at least twice before posting when you're tired.

Real UPDATE: Further news from photoshop news. Apparently, Mr. Hamburg is going to be working on revolutionary new OS interaction methods. Seems like this is the hot field for programming geniuses to be in nowadays. And it makes sense. The last/only great evolution we've seen was the mouse/desktop analogy paradigm. I'm not sure if Microsoft will be the company to come up a new way of interacting with a computer, but here's to Mark's efforts!

Which, for a Photoshop geek like me is fantastic. I've throughly enjoyed the saga of Donnie, – the dark, sarcastic humor is right up my alley – and it's told in a context I can totally relate to (the photoshop part, not the SWAT team). Here's to Big Fat Brain, and a hearty cheers again to Time.com for the excellent coverage!

They then ranked ISPs by how many attempted TCP connections were interrupted by reset packets. And guess who is at the top of the list.

If you said "Comcast," you guessed correctly. According to the Vuze people's initial results, the number of reset connections was 20 percent for that ISP's subscribers.

Vuze says some ISPs abuse TCP resets; data not that clearcut

Well, they are a bit of a biased source– but this is certainly a limit on the internet – censorship in a form not quite as extreme as China's but certainly uncalled for. It is reasons like this that we need government regulation on the internet.

The technology is 15 years old at this point. For a country that depends as heavily as they do on the internet, the US, the internet is still a wild-west of legality.

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.

Rupert Murdoch is moving to tighten his already-imposing grip on American news media, striking a tentative deal to buy his third New York-based paper, Newsday, and getting his first chance to appoint the top editor of The Wall Street Journal, after the resignation of the editor on Tuesday.

-Murdoch Moving to Buy Newsday for $580 Million - New York Times

Woah. This deal is surprising to say the least, but I rather like the way the NYT covered this. It's biased, no doubt about it, but I think this is a rare case where being biased is a good thing.

News Corp. buying Newsday puts it in control of another of the nation's top 10 newspapers (the other being The New York Post), both in the New York area. The article does state that "a takeover of Newsday by News Corporation, which also owns two New York City television stations, could face trouble with regulators."

The article fails to mention that the NYT is also in New York City and will have to deal with the fallout from the takeover as well.

That said, I'm a big fan of Outfoxed, a big critic of the Murdoch Effect (though I actually like some of the 'infotainment' principal), and against media conglomerations. Though this article was a bit more news analysis than it should have been, I'm pleased that the tilt was so anti-News Corp.

To make the attack on CNN a literal truth, Chinese Hackers have launched a DoS attack on CNN.com. They've got so far as to launch a downloadable tool for all those interested in assisting in the next attack.

How does bringing down a media outlet help stop western media bias? …when the bias is that the Chinese society is closed and not open to hearing outside opinions?

All of this in protest to CNN's 'media bias' against the Chinese.

Maulvi Omar, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, said his group had demanded Mohammad's release in discussions with the government.

"We hope the government will take more such confidence-building measures," he said.

-Pro-Taliban Leader Released by Pakistan - washingtonpost.com

So much for not negotiating with terrorists: the Pakistani government strikes again. First they ask us not to cross their borders – they will take care of their terrorist problem on their own thank you very much.

Well, looks like their way of taking care of it, is to release prisoner in exchange for talks. I understand that Pakistan doesn't want the US "meddling" in what are admittedly, their affairs, but this is just another problem that the US has and cannot control.

[House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] added that Bush needs to tell the American people how keeping 140,000 troops in Iraq will help reduce the threat the nation faces because the U.S. military is bogged down in Iraq, what conditions will be needed for further troop withdrawals beyond July and how much longer the threat from extremists hiding along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border will be allowed to "grow because our resource commitment in Iraq makes is impossible to respond adequately."

-Bush to Announce Shorter Tours – Time.com

TIME yet again posts a fantastic photo collection. This time, by Magnum Photographer Stuart Franklin who spent 10 years photographing trees. A rather mundane, but fascinating subject.

This is a decent collection of images from the anniversary festival in Rome. I like this one for it's humor.

A great example from the AP what a cheap piece* of video equipment can do for multimedia journalism. Good on'ya AP.

*I presume it's cheap because of the quality of the footage. (dynamic range isn't that great), but it might rather expensive.

The official Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily, said patriotism should be expressed rationally.  

They also accuse the West of supporting Tibetan separatists, and the Western media of bias.

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | China urges 'rational' protests

Sort of the anti-protest protest in China, I find this to be… ironic.

• China has heavily state-controlled media. It censors the internet, specifically western news sources and sites (like wikipedia) that could contradict the State's version of events. Complaints about a western media bias are, needless to say, ironic.
• There were less than 1000 protestors. In China, the most populace place in the world, the number '1000' doesn't mean much when it comes to people. It is a very weak show of force. 1,300 people protested in London in the same time frame against the alleged media bias. If Londoners can gather that many people for this cause, than certainly, the Chinese conter-parts can at least match them in numbers. It's almost like a PR stunt by the State as a way to show that their people are behind them.
• China has a history of stopping free speech that they don't agree with. Clearly, they allowed this protest to continue despite being "closely patrolled by police."

All that said. The right to protest and voice an opinion is a welcome improvement to China's state-controlled politics.

Representatives of the EU's 27 member states formally agreed today to harmonize their respective countries' definitions of criminally prosecutable acts of terrorism by expanding them to include three new types of crimes: "public provocation to commit a terrorist offence, [terrorist] recruitment, and training for terrorism." The definition of "public provocation" was especially controversial, and it encompasses content posted on the Internet, including not only direct incitements to violence but also terrorist propaganda and bomb-making expertise.

EU states agree that inciting terrorism on the Internet is a crime

As a timely follow-up to the recent news that the UK has jailed 6 men for publicly supporting terrorism through speech, the EU has legally declared that internet support of terrorism is also a crime. This is a severe blow to freedom of speech advocates everywhere.

Terrorists are using the internet to spread their message. I don't deny this at all. The problem with making that act illegal is the definition of who a 'terrorist' is. I heartily submit that this definition is by no means concrete enough to make their support illegal.

Al-Queda is a terrorist organization. Banning their internet activities probably enhances our security. Is Hamas a terrorist organization? They are also a political group. Should be ban them? What about PETA? Should their website be taken off-line?

Fortunately, there is still good news. Although the EU has passed this law, they have not really provided a means of enforcing it. Though the paper precedent is on the books, it does not look like it can be acted on … yet.

U.S. and Iraqi troops clamped down on Sadr City after fighting spread and attacks against the Green Zone intensified in the wake of the offensive. Four Americans were killed in near daily shelling.

Iranian Ambassador Denounces U.S. - TIME

This TIME article does a pretty good job showing how much of a mess Iraq is right now. The Iraqi army is attempting to be effective, but they still rely heavily on the US and the UK to do their job. Their job of course, is to try to maintain some sort of status quo between themselves and the insurgents. Iran is not helping matters at all, with their ambassador calling for the end of bloodshed – but only for those on his side. US soldiers continue to die without accomplishing their mission. And, concrete walls are still being constructed in an effort to secure the green zone.

Right. It's been said before, but: "mission accomplished." Right.

China's fight with CNN is part of a broader effort to challenge those who question its response to last month's protests in Tibet or criticize the Olympic torch relay, which traveled Thursday through New Delhi under heavy guard on its way ultimately to Beijing.

China Spurns Apology, Keeps Pressure on CNN - washingtonpost.com

There's a great example of how free the Chinese media is – no word of protest against the regime is to be tolerated. Granted, CNN certainly editorialized in their coverage – cropping a photo to eliminate protestors.

Nonetheless, this latest 'offense' took place on the show The Situation Room which is a FOX inspired show on CNN. That is to say, it's full of opinions and not facts.

The Chinese media seems to make a habit of taking a bit of truth (usually a rightful complaint) and spinning to the point where it's unrecognizable.

At his home in Riyadh, his family kept a Filipino cook, driver, and maid who washed his briefs. "I don't know how to cook or to clean my clothes," he told me. "So, whenever I am in the United States, I just wear my underwear once … and then throw them away."

Inside Saudi Arabia. - By Nicholas Schmidle - Slate Magazine

What a great quote to pull out in a brief article about the state of social progression in Saudi Arabia. The article is short, but worth a read to get an idea of what a modern, islamist, monarchy is like.

Six men convicted of supporting terrorism through speeches at a London mosque have been handed jail terms.

BBC NEWS | UK | Six jailed for supporting terror

The UK has just sentenced six men to jail terms based on something they said. That's right, 'freedom of speech' – not guaranteed by the UK government exists just a bit less than it did.

Granted, these men were Muslims who spoke out in favor of Al-Queda or other Islamist terrorists publicly. Granted, I have no liking of what they said, and I am personally very glad to see them in jail.

The question remains though – is it okay for a government to abandon the freedom of speech so blatantly?

PopPhoto is running a great series of articles on pro travel photographers, and how they 'made it.' The stories are interesting reads and the photos, are pretty spectacular. I particularly like Gregg Bleakney, who's photo is above.

Wang crawled to the master bedroom, hid behind the bed and tried to think of who might have a BlackBerry on hand. The obvious answer: a Hill staffer like Pitts.

Press secretary to the rescue - Ryan Grim - Politico.com

Here's a feel-good story: a Washington Press Secretary helps out one of his reporters in the midst of a home-invasion. Here's to always being 'connected.'

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.

Speaking at the parade, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran was the most powerful nation in the world.

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Iran shows off its military might

The laughable statement made by Ahmadinejad is just another in is list of half-truths and lies that he's said on the world stage.

This however, is not what I want to address. This article, which is not much more than large blurb (it has no direct quotes, is only 11 paragraphs), is accompanied by the photograph above.

Now, I can guarantee that there are shots of large missiles, tanks, and even the 200+ aircraft that flew over as part of the parade. The editor, however, chose this rather humorous picture of Iranian troops on ¿dirt bikes? It looks like they're riding two to a bike.

I think that this a perfect example of editorial bias – for the better.

This is by far the coolest picture of the group, although I quite like the opening photo as well.

The Pope followed with his speech, where said this:

"Democracy can only flourish, as your founding fathers realized, when political leaders and those whom they represent are guided by truth and bring the wisdom born of firm moral principle to decisions affecting the life and future of the nation," he said.

At White House, Pope Lauds Americans’ Faith - New York Times

Wonder if democracy is flourishing under Bush?

…enduring problem that threatens to undercut any inroads Clinton has made in her struggle to overtake him in the Democratic presidential race: She has lost trust among voters, a majority of whom now view her as dishonest.

Poll Shows Erosion Of Trust in Clinton - washingtonpost.com

Clinton is apparently having trust issues. Understandable considering her 'sniper fire' incident, Bill Clinton's defense of the same, among other issues. Polls show that just 39% of Americans trust her – way down from when she started her campaign.

Ironically enough, that polling puts her trust level just 6 points above President Bush's overall approval level. And yet, Bush doesn't seem to have had that moment in the media where they've said, "we can't trust you."

Despite the many mistruths/fabrications/streches/long stories/enter-your-euphemism-here/lies the Bush Administration has told about Iraq, the war on terror, the existence of WMDs, Scooter LIbby, torture, etc… The media has yet to denounce the President and his Administration as un-trustworthy.

https://End liberal, leftist, but-oh-too-true rant

The article cover the entire story nicely. But I think I'll just leave it at a picture is worth a 1000 words.

Commandment I Thou shalt not launch preventive wars.

Commandment II Do not exaggerate the threat posed by terrorism.

Commandment III Dry up the terrorist swamp.

Commandment IV Recognize that not all terrorists are the same.

Commandment V Reject the idea of "a clash of civilizations."

Commandment VI Do not allow neoconservatives anywhere near Middle East policy.

Commandment VII Talk to Iran.

Commandment VIII Make resolving the Israeli-Palestinian crisis our top foreign-policy priority.

Commandment IX Get the media to grow a spine.

Commandment X Grow up and join the world.

Iraq: The ten commandments | Salon

That should give you a pretty good idea what the article is about. The intro is way lefty and liberal – deciding that there is no choice but the withdraw from Iraq – even if McCain is elected. The meat of the article however, is fantastic. I highly reccomend the read. The list of ten things that needs to be done is quite good in my opinion.

"We're thinking more about industry," we were told. "P2P companies, ISPs, academics."

Why wouldn't consumer groups with the relevant experience in these matters be consulted, we asked. "I don't know," Douglas said after a long pause, but added that Comcast hasn't ruled anything out at this point.

Comcast to spearhead creation of P2P Bill of Rights

Comcast has only just agreed to stop throttling bandwidth over P2P networks. Now they want to create a P2P bill of rights!?

This seems… disingenuous; at least.

Possible ideas for the "rights" section of the document include the ability to uninstall P2P applications, along with "clarifying usages" (that is, describing bandwidth limits, which would be welcome). Douglas also noted that P2P apps might be able to "identify lawful content versus not lawful."

Yea, sure, might be able to identify illegal content. Right… I have no doubt that this would be one of the pillars of this 'bill of rights.'

Comcast: I'm all for you trying to get involved in this – it's actually something of an enlightened attitude as compared to the RIAA or MPAA, but you spearheading an this effort is like President Bush offering advice on how to deal with the Middle East. –It's just not a good idea.

• Bush's overall approval rating: 33%
• Disapprove: 64%
• Approve handing of Iraqi War: 33%
• Disapprove: 65%
• Approve handling of economy: 28%
• Disapprove: 70%

Public disapproval of the way President Bush is handling the nation's economy has hit a new high in Washington Post-ABC News polling, and his overall favorability rating remains near an all-time low.

In a poll that confirms what most of us already know… the economy is doing poorly and the Bush Administration is not doing any better.

Yes, that's my summary of the poll results :)

"As the world's biggest executioner, China gets the 'gold medal' for global executions," said the organisation's UK director, Kate Allen.

"According to reliable estimates, on average China secretly executes around 22 prisoners every day - that's 374 people during the Olympic Games," she added.

Apparently, the idea of capital crimes is a bit different in China than the rest of the world:

More than 60 crimes can carry the death penalty in China, including tax fraud, stealing VAT receipts, damaging electric power facilities, selling counterfeit medicine, embezzlement, accepting bribes and drug offences, Amnesty [International] said.

…and the idea of due process is a bit different than western states:

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville, in Beijing, says justice is usually swift - most of those sentenced to death are executed only weeks after they are found guilty.

The article then goes on to discuss the findings in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries – where the death penalty is also prevalent. Iran was the only country to have more reported capital punishments than China.

The report and article end with a call for the world to stop employing the death penalty.

WebKit now supports gradients specified in CSS. There are two types of gradients: linear gradients and radial gradients.

Introducing CSS Gradients

For us geeky web designers out there this is just plain Cool!

For those not so geeky, it means this: what could have taken over 20 lines of code can now be done in 1. Oh and when you're browsing, you won't have to download all kinds of drop shadow images – which means faster loading times.

The Associated Press announced Monday it will … develop an advertising-supported service that will deliver stories and photos to advanced cell phones, including the iPhone.

AP Cuts Prices, Announces Mobile Product - washingtonpost.com

And the inevitable happens. The AP goes online in mobile (and bigger way). The strategy to encourage outlets to tag online photos is great for the industry as a whole.

Of course, this will help the newspaper industry a lot too:

Altogether, the expected savings from participating in the digital indexing program combined with the savings from the new pricing mechanism would add up to $21 million. That represents 10 percent of the total fees that member newspapers pay the AP.

By "style" I mean, very simply, the combination of the photographer's way of work plus the end result. … With "meaning" or "contents" I am trying to describe what the photos actually say, their intended message.

It's good to see any journalist, let alone a photographer, freed.

XSS attacks were becoming more popular because more and more websites were writing their own snippets of code so visitors could get more out of a site, he said.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Hackers exploit poor website code

Here's the downside the Web 2.0 – a lot of what web designers are trying to accomplish has never been done in quite the same way before. That means that they're writing a lot of custom code… and making a lot of the security mistakes that 'standard' code had eliminated years ago.

So… 'bout time we found a serious downside to Web 2.0.

Unsurprisingly, the Olympic torch hasn't sparked any protests in the non-democractic country of Oman. Of course it helps that the country is controlled by the Sultan who is an absolute ruler. His interest in limiting any protests is this:

Oman has strong economic ties with China, a major importer of its oil.

It seems that the stop in Tanzania was equally uneventful. The country is democratic, having developed it's government after it's British colonial experience. I suppose that the people of the country have worries greater than the human rights violations of China and/or the freedom of Tibet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3ybu4YmdNE

TIME is running some excerpts out of Nick Veasey's new book which captures photos without using visible light like most of us do. This concept is actually that original, people have thought of it before, but Veasey is particularly talented, and his subjects are well chosen.

The U.S. government has spent "more than half-a-trillion dollars" in support of the war effort, while that money could be spent on pressing needs in this country, he said. Economy Sagging Due to Iraq War? - TIME

The article goes on to list poll results stating that 68% of the American people think that withdrawing from Iraq would help the countries economic troubles. The argument is fairly convincing. Especially considering that the US annual budget is now over $3 trillion, and the US GDP is now $13.13 trillion.

The point is well made that this war has had significant negative impact on the US economy. This is the point that I'd like to dwell on.

Historically, wars have been good for the US economy. They've sparked economic mobilization, technological advances, and increased economic output. Now, I'm not sure if this holds true for the Vietnam War (I suspect it does, but I cannot find anything to back it up). It certainly holds true for:

• The Revolutionary War
• The War of 1812
• The Civil War
• World War I
• World War II
• The Korean War
• The Gulf War

If it is to be believed that the Iraqi War has actually harmed the US economy, then I think that it is remarkable in that it is the first. It's also important examine why that has happened. These factors would be invaluable in assessing the worth, or even the status, of a war. One might even make a case for economics determining the 'correctness' of a war in the future.

Capping a week in which protesters snuffed the torch in Paris and forced organizers to reroute its course in San Francisco, the South American leg of the relay was more festive than disruptive. Small groups of demonstrators held signs decrying human rights abuses in China, but the most serious threats to the torch's progress Friday were a few lobbed water balloons -- easily swatted away by the Chinese security forces that jogged alongside the torch bearers.

A Lighter Day for Torch in Argentina - washingtonpost.com

Well… good news. There were protestors, and they did make themselves heard. It's a shame that they tried to put out the torch – but it's comical that their attempts were primarily using water balloons. …The security people explained before going to Argentina that the torch was propane powered and a rain storm wouldn't put it out, I doubt water balloons will have any effect – let alone enough accuracy.

Looks like the run the Argentina was uneventful, which is great, but the article did have one great quote at the end from an anonymous Chinese blogger in regards to French protestors trying to put out the torch:

"France, I thought you were a romantic and beautiful country but now I realize you are ugly and full of rubbish. No country can stop China from being strong and developing," said one anonymous online commentator.

Me thinks that the Chinese media is putting a pretty strong 'spin' on why these people are protesting. It appears that this guy believes that the West is upset at China's strength and presumable economic progress. I'm pretty sure that the protestors are upset with two things:

1. China's human right's violations
2. Freeing Tibet from Chinese rule

Chinese economic progress has nothing to do with it, but here's to Chinese censorship!

We carried the injured to our own cars and hurried them to nearby hospitals. Others used wooden carriages to do the job of the ambulance. Some rescuers were using fire extinguishers and buckets filled with water to fight big fires, and others were wrapping the bodies of women, kids and men with blankets and kept shouting, “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.”

My Neighborhood - Baghdad Bureau - Iraq From the Inside - New York Times Blog

This is another piece of phenomenal journalism from the NY Times. Written by an Iraqi journalist employed by the Times, this piece describes the resolve and willingness of the Iraqi people to deal with the problems of their country – namely terrorism.

The piece is short, and well written, very worth a read to get a quick insight into the mind of an Iraqi.

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.

Authorities are deploying 1,300 federal police, 1,500 naval police and some 3,000 traffic police and volunteers — enough to ensure security "without going to the extreme that nobody will be able to see the torch," Irarrazabal said.

Olympic Torch Stops in Argentina - TIME

HAHA…haha…hoho…hehee… sniff – oh dear. Well, at least we can still see the torch.

Comm 'on people … isn't this getting a bit ridiculous? I think that Mayor Mauricio Macri who "… urged protesters to stay away and not make "politics" of a sporting relay," is half right. I mean, yes, it is a sports relay – but you're kidding yourself if you think politics aren't involved. The Olympics were created to show international unity – if there isn't international unity (don't know if you've been checking the news recently, but there's not), then people have the right to protest the Olympics.

Protesting is the right of all people who live in a free state. They even have the right to try to challenge something as symbolic as the Olympic torch. Granted – they risk bearing the consequences (and they well should); but they do have that right.

The security around the Olympic torch should lighten up. It's good that they're so vigilant, but they need to understand the right that people have to protest is going to be used. It's their job to 'secure' the torch not to hide it, put it out, put it on a bus in case of rain, or somesuch.

Also on Friday, the chairman of Japan's National Public Safety Commission said Japan will not accept Chinese security guards when the city of Nagano hosts the torch relay on April 26.

"We should not violate the principle that Japanese police will maintain security," Shinya Izumi said at a press conference. "I do not accept the idea that they will run in Japan as they did in other countries."

The Chinese runners, who wear bright blue tracksuits, ran to protect the torch in London and Paris, where chaotic torch protests interrupted the relay. Beijing has said only that the unit's mission was to guard the flame.

Way to go Japan. I'm well aware that there are greater political statements to be made hear than: 'the Chinese security are overbearing and out-of-line,' but I'm hopeful that Japan at least will host the torch correctly – displaying it proudly and let the protestors do what they may.

Says Alia Nasayif Jasim of the secular Iraqi National Accord bloc: "As Iraqis, from what we've seen of the bitterness in the American relationship with the Middle East, we don't think it matters who holds the presidency."

Moqtada al-Sadr, who demands an immediate end to the "American occupation," expressed more apathy than a particular preference for Clinton or Obama — both of whom have called for a timetable for exiting the country. "Before each election campaign, we hear a lot of promises and slogans, but the reality after the election is something else," says Sadrist Member of Parliament Fawze Akram, who said he doubted any candidate would actually follow through on a speedy troop withdrawal.

Tahsin al-Shiekhly, spokesman for the Baghdad Security Plan, which oversees police and military checkpoints in the capital, said … "The U.S. has a commitment to the people of Iraq. They liberated them and they have come to rebuild the country. Whoever the next President is — even Hillary Clinton — I don't think they will withdraw troops from Iraq," he said. But so long as that concern is met, Sheikhly said he would choose Obama. "I support Barack Obama because I think he is reliable. He is trying to fix the base of American society and trying to cleanse American foreign policy." A Baghdad View of the US Election - TIME

What an overbearing sense of … apathy. It seems that Iraqis have accepted the fact that the US troops are necessary to prevent total chaos – they also don't see a way for the US to withdraw, it's just not in anyone's interests right now.

The fact Iraqis seem to think that it doesn't really matter who wins the next election is probably a sad, realistic truth. Us Americans all seem to think that who controls the presidency next will have a huge impact. – Indeed it will, but not on troop levels in Iraq. It probably won't really effect the short-term in Iraq at all.

What the Iraqis do fail to realize is that the next president of the US will have a drastic effect on the long-term US policy towards Iraq. In my opinion, they better hope it's a democrat and not a neo-con that gets the oval office next.

In its recently released annual report titled “The State of the News Media,” the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which is led by Tom Rosenstiel, stated that broadcast news outlets needed to diversify more quickly across platforms if they were to survive.

CBS Said to Consider Use of CNN in Reporting - New York Times

…which doesn't mean that we need to loose diversity in our news media – yet again.

The idea of CBS cutting most of it's reporting capabilities in favor of relying on CNN is not just bad, but horrible. The last thing we need is a bigger conglomeration of media outlets relying on each other.

CBS may be that solid third place finisher, but it doesn't matter. They keep the two top dogs (FOX and CNN) in line. Its important to have as many media outlets as possible so that:

• Other media outlets will get their 'facts' checked. When a news company reports something wrong, its frequently another media outlet that corrects them.
• It would be easy enough to fool one watch dog, it's harder to fool two, it's harder still to fool three. You get the point… The more news organizations we have out there, the less likely it is that the public will get fooled
• The basic principal of a free market should prevail.

Please CBS, say it ain't so!

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

ABC News: Sources: 'Principals' OK'd Harsh Tactics

This new is a couple of days old, but … wow. I suppose this has been known/guessed at for a while now. But it's a pretty easy step here to say that 'senior administration officials' have committed a crime or two here. As a matter of fact, they certainly have.

advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

"The men in blue perplexed everyone," she said. "Nobody actually seemed to know who they were officially or what their title was. They were kind of very robotic, very full on."

Top Cops Protect Olympic Flame - TIME

My last post encouraged me to do a little bit more searching into the Olympic torch journey. Apparently, these Chinese men in blue are the official security detail from China. They're the ones who decided to put out the Torch in France and have been very rough with … everybody. Be they protestors, torch bearers, or the Chairman of the Olympic Committee (really, read the article).

Several thoughts occur to me:

• If the Chinese are this serious about security, then the chances of a terrorist succeeding in Beijing are very small, go China.
• The fact that these high ranking security guards only understand basics of other languages and were chosen based on how "tall, handsome, mighty, in exceptional physical condition similar to that of professional athletes" they are means that the Chinese are just going to run this Olympics their way – forget everyone else.
• That's not necessarily a bad thing. It might help us westerners better understand the Chinese way of doing things.
• …or it will just piss us westerners off and cause all kinds of incidents

(oh, yea, and I really do like this slideshow from Time that I keep pulling pictures from.)

"I took my kids out of school early to see it," said Greta Keegan, waiting patiently on a curb along the announced route with Cormac, 9, and Maeve, who turned 12 on Wednesday. By 2 p.m. there was no sign of the torch

San Francisco Takes Olympic Torch Off-Route - washingtonpost.com

I thought the French were stupid when they put the Olympic torch out themselves and put it on a bus surrounded by roller-blading cops. But we Americans, have topped that. In San Francisco, they changed the route and didn't bother to tell anyone.

The whole point of the torch going through a city is so that people can see it. Hiding it for security concerns is just dumb. If people want to protest, then that's their right, for that matter, it should be encouraged!

Having the Olympics in Beijing is very controversial, the US and French governments agree (in part) with the protestors. Here's to the Brits for handling this right.

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.

So you know that feelin' when you know you had a good shoot. There's a smile on your face. A bounce in your step. You drop everything to upload the images and three star them almost immediately.

...this feeling was ruined for me today when I picked up a copy of the student daily. Not only was the back page photo grey - legit, no tonality whatsoever - but the edit was atrocious. I knew I had better photos than the ones they ran; I had posted them on facebook! ::insert mental screaming here:: I am sick of subpar editing! and learning nothing more than the latest mix of Cher and DJ Unk! I want someone to see where I'm not seeing, to give me suggestions, and slam my framing (or lack thereof). I want someone to transfer my card, hand it to me, and tell me "you're good."

Confessions of a Caffeine Addict: I must be American, 'cause I run on Dunkin'

Well said. Can't tell you how much that bothers me too.

No doubt, sports are a little hard to edit. Frequently you do need that shot of that one play or that one player doing just the right thing. It's hard if you don't come back with the shot they need. Editors frequently have a choice of publishing a sub-par shot that shows what they need to depict, or pissing off the sports editors and publishing a shot that is good, but doesn't go with the story.

Which is better for the paper? I don't think there is a hard and fast rule. Ultimately, the situation should never exist. It's the photographer's fault if they didn't cover the story well enough to come back with the photos that are needed. It's hard to complain if you didn't do your job right.

On the other hand, if you did do your job; did come back with that shot that tells the story of the whole game, and the editor still picks a different shot … well, then. He better have a damn good reason. If he doesn't then he's not doing his job.

• Craigslist
• Word of mouth.
• Referrals from a past job.
• My college buddies. (Especially Chris)
• My colleges job board for alumni
• Comedy Central/MTV job hunt board
• Monster.com
• Krop
• Freelancers Union
• Unsolicited resumes

Freelancers: How do you get work? | creativebits

Great idea for freelance work that I never considered: craigslist. Totally free and really well trafficked.

A funny anecdote:

When I went through passport control entering Dublin from the UK, the officer was by far the friendliest that I've ever encountered. She asked how the trip was, how long us "lads" were staying in the country, and so on. She made sure to write on our visas though (two stamps, not just one), that we were supposed to leave the country in 3 days, just as we had said we would.

When reentering the UK (after 3 days in Ireland), we went through to passport control and before even entering the main que, were asked if we were arriving from Ireland. On saying that we had just come in, we were told that there was no need to go through passport control, just show our boarding pass at the exit, and we went right through.

Needless to say, I was a bit shocked – the UK passport control has been the toughest that I've ever seen. Constantly checking my student visa, and assuring that I was still planning to leave when it expires in 4 weeks.

What I gathered from all this was: Ireland is a separate country, but the UK just doesn't really care. International Politics are funny.

[Times Reporter Free on Bail - washingtonpost.com](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/07/AR2008040702633.html?nav=rss_print/asection)

Washington Post Wins 6 Pulitzer Prizes - New York Times

Here's to the prevailing 'feel good' attitude.

"We cannot . . . just say we're coasting through and waiting for the next president."

anonymous GOP senator

"I think it's a very significant issue that has not had sufficient exposure. They're perfectly content to watch us spend our money while they build up these huge cash reserves from oil windfalls. It's a real stick in our eye, as far as I'm concerned."

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee

Congress To Hear Of Gains In Iraq - washingtonpost.com

Yea, woah. Wish I had said it that clearly.

Congrats to the Post and the NY times. The Post has done a magnificent job – especially with the Walter Reed stories. They are a fantastic example of investigative journalism and leveraging the name of a powerful newspaper for the 'public good.' Reports on the political power of Dick Cheney and the importance and use of military contractors also took the prestigious prize.

I'm very happy to see that the prize is still being given to the deserving. Granted I know none of the 'behind-the-scenes' story here (overt reference to The Wire), but these are, in my opinion, the top stories of the year. The Pulitzers are no Oscars – the really do matter.

Cheers all.

Pretty good collection of protest pictures in the collection actually, but I really liked this shot… of the French Police wearing… roller blades. I mean, I've heard of bike cops (bike shorts are not good uniform wear) and horse cops (can't they get ticketed for all the poop they leave?), but roller blading!? The 80's would like their cops back please.

Only the French.

I've been sitting on this article for a while, meaning to respond to the many points it makes, both good and bad. It was published last week. In short, it's an excellent review of the current state of the newspaper industry.

Like I suggest, there are points that I agree with, and points that I don't. I will try to write that post in the near future, but if you have any interest in the current state of f the industry, read this (very long) article.

I will be traveling (in Dublin) this weekend, and will have limited internet access.

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.

In a forum posting Tuesday, iStockphoto head honcho Bruce Livingstone said the Getty Images subsidiary had 2007 revenue of $71.9 million, and it paid $20.9 million to those who contributed the imagery it licenses.

iStock reveals revenue, photographer payouts | Underexposed - CNET News.com

The first interesting thing here is that iStockPhoto pays out roughly 29% of what they make on sales – that's pretty much as suspected. That $71.9mil number though is kind of scary. That's a lot of money to making on royalty free sales. It means that it's revenue lost out of a lot of pro's pockets.

At the WWDC show last June, however, Adobe & other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa (as Lightroom is) instead of Carbon. This means that we'll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa.

John Nack on Adobe: Photoshop, Lightroom, and Adobe's 64-bit roadmap

So… Windows will get a 64-bit version of Photoshop in CS4, Mac will not. Bummer. Real big bummer.

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.

As I'm not in NY right now, I don't have access to a copy of the Times, but apparently, they've introduced a new design type that front loads a bunch of summaries into the first 3 pages of the paper.

Sounds like a good idea to me – people are used to seeing quick little blurbs on the web all the time. Moving a print paper in the same direction seems like a logical choice. Of course, it only works if you have full articles to back the summaries up.

Update: Here's a pretty good feature summary/review of the new Lightroom.

Update2: The above article combined with Adobe's own warnings have convinced me not to adopt this is my primary workflow software yet. (huge bummer) The fact that metadata almost certainly won't carry over and the inability to support LR v1.x libraries is a huge pain. Plus it's not been guaranteed that libraries created in a beta of version 2 can be carried over to the shipping release. I'll just have to wait for beta 2.

see comment on Creative Bits

The secular government of Turkey has gotten the Supreme Court to hear a case on banning their main party from politics. The competing party, which insists that they to are secular has been increasing in popularity and represents the single biggest challenger to the current government.

My question is this: Which is less democratic: to ban a religiously tilted political party or to ban a political party?

well, crap.

funny funny.

"For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us."

Vatican: Islam World's Largest Faith - TIME

This is a good one. Pretty spectacular actually. Apparently, Sony BMG, strong member of the RIAA, was caught using pirated software on their servers in France. 47% of the software on the servers was pirated. That's quite a bit of piracy there.

Questioned about the fact that this is perhaps the single act of an employee, the CEO of PointDev retorts, "I think piracy is linked to the policy of a company. If the employee has the necessary funding to buy the software they need, it will. If this is not the case, he will find alternative ways, as the work must be done in one way or another."

Slashdot | Sony BMG Sued For Using Pirated Software

"At first I thought these were American soldiers and I wanted them to leave but when they said they were Muslims I knew they were our brothers," a young Afghan man says.

Muslim Troops Help Win Afgan Minds – BBC News

Apparently, the United Arab Emirates (the UAE, a small little country south of Iraq for those not familiar with the region's geography) has secretly had troops in Afghanistan helping both the American and British soldiers on the 'hearts and minds' campaign.

Fascinating and really good to hear.

Here is what happens in the dream: Because I know a little Arabic, I somehow find myself a translator for the invaders, even as some of my Chicago buddies are in the alleys plotting against my employers. And each night when I walk home along my beloved Dearborn Street under the rusty elevated tracks and past the White Hen grocery store, I wonder what the guys poring over maps in their armored vehicles plan to accomplish against a few million South Siders fighting in their own alleys. That’s usually when I wake up.

In Shiite Slums, Victory Must Be Won in the Alleys - New York Times

An incredibly personal account by James Glanz, who tells the rather amazing story of Sadar City from a depressingly personal way that shows greater knowledge of the Iraqi political and cultural realm. It's a short and good read.

The designer of Coda. This mostly satisfies my geeky side to watch, but it does have a bunch of funny lines (if you're a geek), and stays entertaining (mostly if you're a designer, programmer, or a geek).

The most interesting part for me (as a geeky designer) was that he jumps straight to photoshop to do mockups. I've always been told (and I find it much easier to) sketch stuff out before hand – then go to photoshop. I suppose if it works for him, then cheers; just not my approach. Although his process of creating a huge multi-layered PSD file is exactly what I do too. I wish my developer (coughphillcough) would look at the darn thing though. 

The model for the future is somebody who can go out and capture content, the imagery that tells the story correctly in a narrative, and then on the back end produce it -- put it together in a program like FinalCutPro," says Pancho Bernasconi, director of photography for Getty's worldwide news division. "That's key, to have that quick turnaround. Time is always an issue, so if you have someone who can do it all themselves, that's a really attractive thing."

The Photographer As Director – American Photo

This is a really great article to read if you're considering or are in a career in photography. Mark my words. Within 10 years, the professions of photography and videography will be so fused, it will be hard to tell the difference.

Proof? Well, first off there's the progression of major news outlets towards multimedia. It's slowly becoming expected that photographers know something about audio if not video too.

Second, there's that inevitable increase in technology. The still sort of new Red One Camera, has the potential to revolutionize the way small budget films are shot – which is to say higher than HD quality. 12MP, as a matter of fact. Yea, 12MP, that's good enough for me for stills. Once these guys figure out how to make this camera portable (as in you can record for hours without the need for a bunch of hard drive arrays tethered to the camera), there's almost no reason to shoot stills. Just shoot this sucker (the Red Five or so?) at full res at the already available 60FPS and life is good.

Lastly, I'll blame the Internet. Thanks to youtube, people are so used to seeing video online, that looking at a simple photo is the least they expect. They want to be entertained, and amazed by moving pictures. It's easy enough to understand why too. There's something about movement that you just can't get from a still frame. (Visa versa is true too of course, but why have only one when you can have both?)

Right. Not too sure where to end this, except to say that this is an argument/discussion that I've been having with many people for a while now and this has really only been a splurge of thought onto the keyboard.

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

No matter how long you're in this business of conflict photography you will always feel fear. When you no longer feel it, then it's time to get out.

John Moore, Pop Photo 

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

Basically, this: a freshman at the university of Toronto (Canada) created a study group of facebook. His professors, apparently unaware of what goes on in a study group, not only failed him (he was earning a 'B'), but recommended him for expulsion based on 147 counts (the number of people in the group) of academic integrity violations.

Wow, do they not get it. Online does not equal cheating. Free access to more people and more information is one of the great things about the internet. Using a facebook group to post questions from previous tests, class notes, chapter summaries, etc… is just genius. I wish I could have had such things in high school. It's a logical use for not only the internet, but Facebook.

[](http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=11203)[ DailyTech - Student Wins Victory Over School in Facebook Expulsion Debacle ](http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=11203)

The milestones for each 1,000 deaths — while an arbitrary marker — serve to rivet attention on the war and have come during a range of pivotal moments. US Death Toll in Iraq Hits 4,000 - TIME

• Photo Essays - TIME](http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1723015,00.html)

It also appears that lower capacity batteries actually hold their charge longer. So check out 2000mAh instead of 2500mAh batteries.

[Coding Horror: Adventures in Rechargeable Batteries](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001078.html)

I'm not a coffee drinker, but this sounds like good news overall. Starbuck's is, while a huge conglomerate, a fairly friendly company IMHO (in my humble opinion). These changes sound good to me. Besides – what's the downside to more free stuff?

##THE TEN LEGAL COMMANDMENTS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

I. Anyone in a public place can take pictures of anything they want. Public places include parks, sidewalks, malls, etc. Malls? Yeah. Even though it’s technically private property, being open to the public makes it public space.

II. If you are on public property, you can take pictures of private property. If a building, for example, is visible from the sidewalk, it’s fair game.

III. If you are on private property and are asked not to take pictures, you are obligated to honor that request. This includes posted signs.

IV. Sensitive government buildings (military bases, nuclear facilities) can prohibit photography if it is deemed a threat to national security.

V. People can be photographed if they are in public (without their consent) unless they have secluded themselves and can expect a reasonable degree of privacy. Kids swimming in a fountain? Okay. Somebody entering their PIN at the ATM? Not okay.

VI. The following can almost always be photographed from public places, despite popular opinion:

• accident & fire scenes, criminal activities
• bridges & other infrastructure, transportation facilities (i.e. airports)
• industrial facilities, Superfund sites
• public utilities, residential & commercial buildings
• children, celebrities, law enforcement officers
• UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, Chuck Norris

VII. Although “security” is often given as the reason somebody doesn’t want you to take photos, it’s rarely valid. Taking a photo of a publicly visible subject does not constitute terrorism, nor does it infringe on a company’s trade secrets.

VIII. If you are challenged, you do not have to explain why you are taking pictures, nor to you have to disclose your identity (except in some cases when questioned by a law enforcement officer.)

IX. Private parties have very limited rights to detain you against your will, and can be subject to legal action if they harass you.

X. If someone tries to confiscate your camera and/or film, you don’t have to give it to them. If they take it by force or threaten you, they can be liable for things like theft and coercion. Even law enforcement officers need a court order.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU’RE CONFRONTED

• Be respectful and polite. Use good judgement and don’t escalate the situation.
• If the person becomes combative or difficult, think about calling the police.
• Threats, detention, and taking your camera are all grounds for legal or civil actions on your part. Be sure to get the person’s name, employer, and what legal grounds they claim for their actions.
• If you don’t want to involve the authorities, go above the person’s head to their supervisor or their company’s public relations department.
• Call your local TV and radio stations and see if they want to do a story about your civil liberties.
• Put the story on the web yourself if need be.

Photojojo » Photography and The Law: Know Your Rights

But Apple's radical opacity hasn't hurt the company — rather, the approach has been critical to its success, allowing the company to attack new product categories and grab market share before competitors wake up. It took Apple nearly three years to develop the iPhone in secret; that was a three-year head start on rivals. Likewise, while there are dozens of iPod knockoffs, they have hit the market just as Apple has rendered them obsolete. For example, Microsoft introduced the Zune 2, with its iPod-like touch-sensitive scroll wheel, in October 2007, a month after Apple announced it was moving toward a new interface for the iPod touch. Apple has been known to poke fun at its rivals' catch-up strategies. The company announced Tiger, the latest version of its operating system, with posters taunting, REDMOND, START YOUR PHOTOCOPIERS.)

How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong

Apple is an evil genius, if you believe this article. It makes many good points, and though long is well worth the read.

[The New Austerity - What's Next 2008 - TIME](http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1720049_1720050_1721656,00.html)

[mezzoblue § Mediatyping](http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2008/03/18/mediatyping/)

Iraqis are finding their lives more hopeful but give the United States little credit for the improvement, an international media poll finds.

Instead, poll respondents credited the Iraqi government, police and army.

Iraqis Don't Credit US for Safer Lives - TIME

Huh. Appears the surge hasn't worked. Go go Bush! (yet again)

We are only now learning about NSL abuses that occurred in 2006. This suggests that we won't learn about 2007 abuses until 2009, and abuses happening today won't be revealed until 2010. After-the-fact investigations and procedural reforms are no substitute for case-by-case judicial oversight. Once abuses have occurred, there isn't a lot that can be done about them. Only by having a judge review each and every national security letter—before it's issued—can we be confident that the abuses identified in recent OIG reports will not recur in the future.

Continued NSL abuses show FBI biased, cannot police itself

National Security Letters are a way for the FBI (and presumably other government agencies) to subvert the need for a court order. Rather disturbing that these exist at all, let alone have gone rampant.

The Lightroom 1.4 update for Mac and Windows has been temporarily removed from the Adobe.com web site. Those Lightroom users who have installed Lightroom 1.4 should uninstall the update and install Lightroom 1.3.1.(Mac, Win) until a further update can be provided.

LightroomNews » Blog Archive » Adobe Yanks Lightroom 1.4 & Camera Raw 4.4

Ouch. That's no good. There's a bug that affects only Windows users and DNG. There's an Olypmus processing bug. But the killer is a bug in the EXIF timestamping that will modify an original RAW files. Ouch. Get this fixed quick Adobe!!!

Back to Baghdad: Hell Reassessed - TIME

Troubled Italian carrier Alitalia has agreed to be bought by rival Air France for a cut-price 138m euros(£106m:$215m) in a move to save the state airline. BBC: Alitalia accepts Air France offerNot that this has to do with anything that I normally blog about†. Just that I find it interesting that Alitalia, which I flew to Italy last week, offered great service. Aside from a hiccup at Milan Airport which was no fault of theirs, their service completely satisfactory. I suppose I was surprised to learn that they are struggling financially so much.† side note: huh. never really thought about that before. I blog. I'm a blogger. Interesting.I sort of hate people who call themselves bloggers. Sounds very… pretentious. Ah well, nothing to be done I suppose.

The media didn't do this kind of "immune system" work when it reported on the run-up to the Iraq war. As a result, more than 70 percent of Americans were convinced that Saddam Hussein was involved in the massacre of September 11. More than 4,000 Americans and over one million Iraqis have been killed in the violence that perhaps could have been averted with better journalism.

Appalling Spread of False Information Requires Stronger Media Accountability | MediaCulture | AlterNet

Article from the leftist Alternet, but addresses one of the key problems of today's media/government/world. The Press is doing a poor job of being a watch dog, the Iraq war is a case in point.

Most Americans just don't care about politics, current news, etc… that's why Paris Hilton gets as much play on CNN as the election. Mass media has to cater to their customers and not just cover the news.

And that's the problem. Major media outlets are no longer just interested in covering the news for the sake of coverage. They're about making money; and that means that there are all kinds of internal issues over what gets play. Add into this mix this administration's propensity to 'control the news' (read: lie) and the media just can't be as effective as it should be.

Dangerous times indeed.

It was the pinnacle of a day of pointlessness on both sides of the Capitol. In the Senate, Vice President Cheney rushed to Capitol Hill to cast a tiebreaking procedural vote -- only for his side to lose in the substantive vote that followed.

Dana Milbank - The Secret Is Out: There Was No Big Secret - washingtonpost.com

Milbank is a favorite reporter of mine at The Post – and this is a great article about the idiocy of Congress when they put their collective [lack of] minds to it.

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

[Simplicity](http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2008/03/05/simplicity/#comment-7099)

One word: so true.

[Neowin.net - TSA causes MacBook Air owner to miss flight](http://www.neowin.net/news/main/08/03/11/tsa-causes-macbook-air-owner-to-miss-flight)

Study Discounts Hussein, Al-Qaeda Link - washingtonpost.com

What's really disappointing is that this only got a couple of inches in the Post. It deserves a full exposé in all the major papers. Preferably reporting a study done by journalists as opposed to a government group that is simply doing background research on itself.

Inspire me, now!

This tech columnist's wife threw his laptop out with the newspaper. That's just funny.

[Levy: Gone, Without a Trace | Newsweek Voices - Steven Levy | Newsweek.com](http://www.newsweek.com/id/120052/)

 [How Google's counterculture changes everything | The Digital Home - Don Reisinger's take on the tech closest to home - CNET Blogs](http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13506_1-9889896-17.html) 

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](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/google-docs-spreadsheets-vs-microsoft.html) 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](http://google.com). 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. 

All professionals have at least four loyalties. First, we have a loyalty to ourselves as human beings and as moral agents. We have personal needs as well as a moral compass that tells us what are the right things and the wrong things to do as human beings. Second, we have a loyalty to our employers. In return for a paycheck, employers have the right to expect us to be loyal to their business practices. Third, journalists have a loyalty to other journalists. When one journalist violates professional standards and practices, other journalists are painted with the same brush. Finally, we have an obligation to society to act in ways that promote the common good. Ethics: The High Price of Ethics - The Digital JournalistIt's really good to know that there are still some higher-ups in the journalism business that still care about these four things. A sincere thank you, and a salute to you Glen Mabie. Cheers. 

Projections show that by next year or the year after, the annual number of high school graduates in the United States will peak at about 2.9 million after a 15-year climb. The number is then expected to decline until about 2015. Most universities expect this to translate into fewer applications and less selectivity, with most students likely finding it easier to get into college.

Math Suggests College Frenzy Will Soon Ease - New York Times

Only this to say: "About time."

In a word… bummer.

“Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe,” said Daniel W. Basse of the AgResource Company, a Chicago consultancy. “But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all.”

A Global Need for Grain That Farms Can’t Fill - New York Times

Notice how the price of food has gone up recently – it's all because the price of grain, worldwide has gone up. Third world countries are now able to afford better food (e.g. bread), which leads to increased demand. Supply hasn't compensated; world stockpiles of grain are at an all time low, and prices have doubled. Great if you're a farmer, sucks for the rest of us.

I have personally seen a loaf of bread at the local supermarket go from £0.70 to £0.90 to £1.20 over the past month and a half. That's nearly double for the same loaf of bread.

To North Koreans, the period just before the spring barley harvest is known as "barley hill." In the past, failure to get over the "hill" has meant death by starvation, particularly during the famine years a decade ago, during which some two million North Koreans died. Even though Seoul is now sending 400,000 tons of rice each month to the North, NGOs have reported scattered food shortages.

Hard to believe that we just sent the NY Phil there… and the whole country is still stuck with a sort of autocratic militaristic feudal police state. …and yet the government is seeing to it that it's citizens remain in the country, despite the starvation conditions.

The situation is unlikely to improve. Sources say it was once relatively easy to bribe North Korean border guards to look the other way when people tried to cross over. Not so now. "It appears the North Koreans have increased salaries on the border, or put more senior guards there, over the past year or so, because things are more difficult now," says a Christian activist working under cover in China. This source, whose group claims to have moved hundreds of North Koreans to freedom over the past three years, says the flow is "now down to a trickle." Public executions, he adds, "are meant to ensure that that remains the case."

AppleInsider | Apple announces iPhone 2.0 software and SDK beta

The article that accompanies this photo is an editorial authored by the three writers of HBO's TV show The Wire. In it they argue the uselessness of the US drug war. Citing a statistic:

A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.

I had actually run across this stat several weeks ago, thought, "Man, that's a little extreme," and then carried on with my life here in London. When put into this context though, the information just becomes annoying. So many of these prisoners are behind bars for a drug charge.

I am of the opinion the US drug policy needs to be changed. We need to explore the options behind legalizing some of the 'illegal' drugs out there today. (I'd start with cannabis, but that's just me.) And, I say this is a person who does not do drugs. At all. I enjoy a drink or two, but drugs, just like cigarettes remain on the untouchable list for me.

Our leaders? There aren't any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure.

…and that's an issue. If the politicians are not motivated to change, then nothing ever will. The American public, in my opinion, has largely forgotten about the drug war. The people who sell drugs have just gotten used to cops beating down their doors and accept it as a risk of doing business. The cops have gotten used to "court pay" and easy arrests that accomplishes nothing. And politicians have gotten used to not having to argue this topic.

The authors close their article by calling for a bit of civil disobedience, which I will happily go along with:

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

 The Wire's War on the Drug War - TIME

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.

is there a difference? ;) (source)

idreamed:

Rather true I suppose. I am a perfectionist. I do believe my computer is better (and often tell others). Macs are a better product. And we don’t hesitate to brag.