instant history

... and my handwriting is as bad as ever.

At least some things don't change.

... why do so many people have different micro-blogging (Twitter, Tumblr, what have you) standards?

Further Reading:

• More on just this question at CNET, which reports that a McCain staffer was suspended for Twittering something ... inappropriate.
  
  

One of my favorite places to stroll around in Manhattan is the Meatpacking District, just a few blocks from where I lived the summer I worked at the New York Daily News.

The giant trestles, unused since the 1980s, once used to hoist freight trains safely above pedestrian traffic but now stand silently rusting above passersby below. The structures were built to last, and last they did, well past their usefulness, past not only their own era of trains but past a period of local poverty and crime and into a new one of redevelopment.

Could their builders have imagined an era where they became more ornamentation than bare utility?

Last week, walking through the same neighborhood, I was reading other people, on Poynter's Online Journalism e-mail list, debate the same question about newspapers: Are these structures that have outlived their function?

What kicked off the discussion was a link to a PRI podcast with Stephen Engelberg, Managing Editor of ProPublica.org, who said 90% of newspaper revenue goes to non-news gathering functions. "This notion of a piece of paper delivered by courier to your doorstep is really quite quaint and 19th century and its very costly," Engelberg said (here's the MP3, that bit is around 12:18 according to the poster).

Eventually, someone responded with:

My 15 year old daughter thinks it is funny that I read a newspaper every day. It's such a "Dad" thing to do... There is no way to get her to read the thing...

I wanted to meekly reply, "Has she seen Sudoku?" After adding the puzzle a paper close to my heart saw print readership shoot up well over 50% in less than a year for that coveted "lost demographic."

But even the best of such strategies, I fear, are just stop gaps for most papers.

Further Reading:

• The Friends of the Highline have put together a history on those trestles.
• Subscribe to Poynter's Online News discussion
• Inferior, web-based Sudoku which lacks its print brethren's tactile feedback.
• Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that newspapers suck on the Web muses Patrick Thornton.

You know, maybe something like this:

Q. I was curious about digital newspaper distribution. I know most papers have their own Web sites, but do any have a virtual subscription? That is, can a newspaper be e-mailed, in much the same way it used to be delivered to your doorstep? I can think of many advantages to this means of distribution, as opposed to offering your digital content solely through access to a Web site.
— Roger Sollenberger

[From Monday's New York Times: Talk to the Times]

While the question's funny (most papers, including the Times, do let you get headlines or even full articles by e-mail), it's probably also a good reminder about how much a gap there is between what newspapers think their readers know about how papers work and what they do, in fact, know.

I used to get requests all the time, at both a very small paper and a very large one, for us to run reader-written "news stories" about one group or another. And why should they know how it works if it's not transparent? Nobody expects a car buyer to understand the mechanics of an engine, nor a computer user to understand circuit design. But we often assume readers understand "off the record," the Chinese wall, and all other sorts of slippery or even basic journalism terms and techniques.


...


Simply accepting pre-written articles sure would save a lot of time though.


Hat tip to Mr. Guess's GChat status

Related Reading:

• Maybe it's not so funny: The Times' e-mail preference is down for me

currently.

• And maybe he meant a print replica, like the Times offers. I used to make fun of the idea of re-purposing the print layout, but now that I no longer have print subscriptions I miss seeing the design elements.

I don't get very hyped up about many movies, particularly to the point of paying to actually see them in a theater, but I'd wanted to see Cloverfield for a while. Why? Because I'm a B-movie Sci-Fi fan at heart, even if I don't devote enough time to the craft.

Cloverfield had one of the more promising ARG's, with a sort of convoluted back story and videos of the monster's first sightings, but all interesting back story, thematic motifs, and context were out the window with the final cut.

More than anything, I felt like I was watching someone play through Half Life 2, minus all the quality voice work and dramatic set pieces. Ah well. Sure, it was pretty, I enjoyed the first-person-ish view (no motion sickness here!), but there just wasn't any there there.

So why am I sharing this with you now, dear reader, eight months after theatrical release? Because according to Google, I'm the first person to call Cloverfield a "disastrous movie." I thought it was kind of punny, anyways.

Related Reading:

• Rotten Tomatoes gives it a generous 77%, but I blame that on all the fan site reviewers.
• The cool, early footage that the movie failed to live up to.
• Cloverfield "Disastrous Movie" search, with Google recommending instead looking for "disastrous love." Um, thanks but no thanks.

As Jonathan Zittrain blogs, the iPhone 3G still leaves free (as in speech) software lovers a lot to worry about, but the App Store implementation in particular gives me hope that the Ubuntu (really, Debian) model of centralized repositories has legs.

I've been a happy Ubuntu user now since the first Warty Warthog release, but strangely enough one of the things some people have the hardest time getting used to is Synaptic, which is the program that Ubuntu uses to download and install most applications.

Unlike Windows or Mac, for example, in Ubuntu you rarely download an application from your web browser or buy a program on a CD. Instead you open up Synaptic, which lets you browse thousands of programs all hosted on a central, often university-run server, with backups distributed across the globe at other volunteer servers.

You can just check off all the applications you might want -- say, word processor AbiWord and paint program GIMP -- and then Ubuntu downloads and installs the programs, occasionally prompting you for administrator access rights to make sure you want to install it and it's not spyware, as well as to get any configuration information it might need.

It's a big shift from what we're used to: Hundreds of different, unvetted online sources and a few expensive boxed applications are all traded for a single online storefront, where nothing is charged for. That store then handles any future patches and upgrades, checking occasionally to see what's new and what you need to keep your system safe.

And now, Apple is bringing this centralized repository system to the masses with the iPhone App Store. Apple strikes a good balance of providing great free content (Pandora, Remote) alongside easily paid for commercial content. Could this be a model for the future of Ubuntu and other Debian repositories?

While many in the Open Source Community abhor closed-source software, many more are fine with it, and giving repository maintainers a cut gives them more incentive to properly maintain their software archives. And that proper maintenance isn't an entirely academic discussion: As University of Arizona researchers discovered, it's very easy to seed these volunteer repositories with malware one way or another (more related discussion on Slashdot.

Even without closed source software, a package manager tightly integrated with a simply payment scheme could be huge boon to Canonical and their various repository hosting partners. Imagine, logging into Synaptic and not only see downloadable software but also the option to buy support in 15 minute increments straight from Ubuntu-maintainer Canonical or licensed third parties.

Canonical has a way to make money off fickle home users, while non-geeks get an easy way to work through their setup problems. That concept could be expanded into a wide array of services, which give greater or lesser access to the host computer depending on what needs to be done or trained.

Ubuntu's had tremendous success in the free software world, and the iPhone App Store validates much of the package management techniques Canonical uses. Now it's time to polish that a little bit and give Ubuntu some real competitive edge.

Edit:I took out the tiny picture of the iPhone store because it looked weird.

So just finished deleting the last of the some 1,500 spam comments, installed a new comment filter, and re-enabled comments. If you have trouble commenting, feel free to e-mail me at lastname at gmail dot com.

Nothing fancy, but the cutaways are still too abrupt and the background noise is horrible. The first could have been mitigated, I think, by better coaching the subjects before the video: Take a good second pause between responding to one another. I think I'd need better sound editing software, or a more secluded location, to deal with the background noise.

Also, for the second half of the video it looks like a metal pole is sticking out of Ron's head. Ouch!

A few summers ago, I was guest editing a blog that covered a few topics I had only loosely tracked before. Since my job was to find and post the most interesting overlooked bits, I gave Yahoo! Pipes a look as a way to create a “news scanner,” and I was really happy with the result, dubbed IvyTrack ... when it worked.

Unfortunately, RSS feeds had a knack for not loading, but today I’m giving it another go with a guide on how to set up your own news topic tracker, including ways to get instant alerts through AOL IM or GChat when news on your beat breaks. Today, it’s all about speed, and Yahoo! Pipes can be a great tool on getting the heads up. Read on for the full guide ...

I've held out for years, but after foregoing a new phone, I finally caved and bought an iPod to console myself. An iPod Touch, no less! After a lifetime of dealing with third-tier MP3 players, I finally have the Cadillac of personal digital media. It plays movies! Music! And it's an Internet Communications Device!

But seriously, I've wanted exactly that slim Internet tablet-y action for a while now, and since the Nokia N800 is, well, less than consumer ready and even less ready to be taken out for a jog, I guess the locked-down Touch will have to do.

Working on a business plan to monetize your content? Kevin Kelly has some words of advice. He has posted an essay on making money from copyable content, particularly in finding differentiators that can't be copied. In bullet forms, his main suggestions:

• Immediacy
• Personalization
• Interpretation
• Authenticity
• Accessibility
• Embodiment
• Patronage
• Findability

I think his core lesson is more important though, and could be summarized What works today, won't work tomorrow. What works tomorrow, won't work the day after. While the media half life was hundreds of years for print, decades for radio and television, it's going to get much, much shorter. Economic models will change as fast as the medium, and so trying to come up with "one strategy" is going to get you left behind.

Kevin Kelly has a blog, The Technium, that's now in my Bloglines.

Just when I made it big enough to get comment spam, I've decided to close up shop. Working 50 hours a week as Managing Editor plus being a full-time student, investigative reporter and aspiring job applicant just leaves no time for this pursuit.

If I ever get a free couple of days, I'll redo this so it's more of a resume/clip book site, with maybe some interesting links scrolling around. Til then, enjoy the scant archives and feel free to leave advertisments for Cialis.

One last link however: In a year's time, something along these lines is what I hope to be doing.

Best,
Michael

No less startling, the majority of those real estate advertisers who are shifting their ad dollars online are not spending them on newspaper web sites. Those dollars are going to independent sites dedicated to snatching home buyers and sellers.

From Media Life. A recent study also stated that realtors are switching simply because they feel that print classifieds are simply not effective when homebuyers themselves are switching to sortable, searchable database solutions.

Without cable for three weeks, postings will be cut back. Regular service will resume Sept. 1.

Chris Anderson's Long Tail has an analysis of how various mass media are faring -- and it doesn't look good.

How much of print journalism's current woes stem from Long Tail economics is up for debate, but a tendency towards concentrating on local over national stories in local media suggests that editors and publishers are responding to the trends.

Anderson's post also suggests that papers are not alone in their struggles to retain customers in the internet age. TV, radio, music and DVDs are all "down."