Morisy.com

Signed up for WorkFlowy via Farhad Manoo's glowing review, and am loving it. I also really like the site's welcome message, sent the morning after you sign up as a nice little ping that you played with this thing yesterday.

I've been paying a lot more attention to welcome e-mails lately, and this one did a great job of mixing an informal tone with useful information to quickly get you in and going.

Here's the e-mail:

Edward Tufte:

Agencies, departments, and organizations don't do things - people do things. People's names should be on things to foster both accountability and pride.

As quoted by Thaler Pekar via Daring Fireball.

Cornell Alumni Magazine has a wonderful interview with the New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin and Businessweek's Peter Coy about their craft, and it's rare that I've seen two journalists open up about their inspiration, motivation and, most revealingly, sourcing.

Sorkin talks about the leg work he did to get his readers an in-the-room feel for his book, Too Big To Fail:

I started my first blog sometime in 2000, and the past year or so, I've been trying to dredge it up from the past. Over a decade ago! Well, I finally came close: I got the username and password to my second blog, since after I wrote some stupid things on the first one, I deleted all the entries and started anew.

Here was that first entry on that blog, posted 2001-05-07 and titled "A new beginning":

One of my first favorite apps for Android was Google Listen, a Labs project that offered a simple way to track and listen to podcasts on the go. No syncing, minimal set up, just click and listen to your favorite shows. You could search and subscribe from the app, or just add audio RSS feeds into Google Reader and it just worked great.

I never stopped programming, not quite. It's just my code became hackier and hackier. For a non-programmer, think of it as writing a novel first by crafting letters into words into sentences but then, rushed for time, you start clipping words from other sources, ransom note style, and pasting them, collage-style, into a book. And then one day, you simply rip and re-order whole pages from Dickens, Stephen King and some cranky luddite journalist.

As best I can tell, it is ending the influence and control of corporate money on politics.

Media has generally seemed to given up deciphering the goals of Occupy Wall Street protesters: Yahoo! News reported protesters have a "murky agenda", while Market Watch called it a "collective, vague effort".

Usually I start beta testing Drupal releases well before it's safe or sane, usually upgrading this site, without any real backups, to the latest, greatest and crashiest. With Drupal 7, I held off because I've been so completely swamped. I'm happy to report that the installation process has been further refined and simplified, particularly when it comes to troubleshooting what you need to jigger a little bit around to get it running properly.

This post is part of the monthly Carnival of Journalism.

Online journalism as a market force has clearly, utterly and totally lost the battle for online video supremacy. In the not-so-quiet armsrace, journalists and other traditional bearers of the craft were laid seige by nimbler, more driven marketing counterparties selling their services to the highest bidder.

I will say this, though: unsolicited redesigns are terrific and fun and useful, and I hope designers never stop doing them. But as they do so, I also hope they remember it helps no one — least of all the author of the redesign — to assume the worst about the original source and the people who work hard to maintain and improve it, even though those efforts may seem imperfect from the outside.

Tried upgrading the site to Drupal v 7 tonight, and made a few mistakes (some in full knowledge) while doing it:

This Month's Carnival of Journalism Question: What qualities should awards like the Online Journalism Awards endorse in an era of such tremendous change in the news industry?