instant history - instant history

24 years old ...

michael morisy — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 02:00:30 +0800

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

At least some things don't change.

If it's not ok to blog critically about your job ...

michael morisy — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:50:20 +0800

... 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.

What happens when the structures outlast the function?

michael morisy — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 07:03:35 +0800

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.

Why don't we see real innovation in the news industry?

michael morisy — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 02:51:04 +0800

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.

Cloverfield: A diastrous movie

michael morisy — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:57:43 +0800

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.

Why the iPhone App Store might be good for Ubuntu

michael morisy — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:22:52 +0800

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.

SPAM-be-gone

michael morisy — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:30:54 +0800

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.

NXTcomm 2008 video: Notes to self

michael morisy — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:42:26 +0800

Well, here is the video I shot in Las Vegas for SearchTelecom's NXTcomm 2008 coverage:

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!

Guide: Make Yahoo! Pipes the ultimate news tracker

michael morisy — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:50:39 +0800

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 ...

1. Log in to Yahoo! Pipes

Just head over to http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ and log in with your Yahoo! account. Don’t have one yet? For shame! Though they try to hide it, Yahoo! has some really great, innovative technology, and Pipes is one of my favorites.

2. Build off a template

No sense reinventing the wheel. I’ve used a pared down IvyTrack v2 as my template, and you can, too, since Yahoo! Pipes lets you copy and edit any public, existing pipes. Simple click the link and click “Clone.”

After a brief loading sequence, you should see a list of (more or less) Ivy League related stories:

Great! Now, click the title and let’s rename it something more appropriate. Since I’m tracking networking equipment vendors these days, I’ll call mine CiscoTrack v1, and change the description below the title as well. Now it’s time to dig into the guts of Pipes.

3. Edit the template to include Google news search

Click edit source, and your browser should go to a page that looks pretty close to the one on the right. We see a bunch of URLs, a bunch of blue connectors, and some other techno mumble jumble. Lets start on the far left, with the bubble menu entitled “Feed Auto-Discovery.” This menu lets you put in a number of website URLs and figures out where their RSS feeds are. It’s simpler than finding the data which Pipes usually works with, which is the RSS feed itself. This particular bubble box has all the Google News alerts I’m interested in tracking, which I found more convenient then signing up for dozens of daily e-mail alerts.

I’m not interested in tracking these topics for my networking equipment feed, and you probably aren’t either, so let’s go ahead and delete all those particular alerts. Simply click the minus sign by each URL. Afterwards, in the Feed Auto-Discovery bubble, you should just have a plus sign next to the words “Page URL”.

Now lets go back to Google News and do a search for a topic we’re interested in. “Cisco” is a good place to start, and the results are pretty on target with what I’m interested in. Just copy the URL that comes up (in this case http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&q=cisco&btnG=Search+News), go back to Pipes, hit the plus sign in Feed Auto-Discovery, and insert the link. After a few seconds, Pipes should figure out where the RSS feed is and start piping in your fresh new search.

To check and see that the items are going through, click the “Loop” bubble below “Feed Auto-Discovery.”

You can then instantly see all the results Google News will return. The reason you have to run “Feed Auto-Discovery” through a loop that looks like it does nothing is because by itself “Feed Auto-Discovery” just returns the URL of the RSS feeds it discovers. After running through the “Loop” function and having Loop “Fetch Feed” URLs, Pipes will return the actual content you’re interested in.

Another company I track is Aruba Networks, but do a search for “Aruba” and way way too much noise comes back. We’ll modify the Google News search to be "aruba networks" OR (aruba ARUN) which will have a smaller scope but will still get most of what we’re interested in, and then copy the URL as before into a new slot.

4. Include other news sources

This continues on with all the Google news topics you are interested in. In the second column, I used a similar search method except with a Technorati blog search. Feel free to experiment with your own favorite search engine, like Summize to track Twitter conversations if that interests you.

Finally, in my third and final column I include websites where all the content is relevant. The three different columns are just used to keep the organization neat, but you can have as many or as few as you want.

In this third column, I’ll typically include related blogs, news sites, press home pages, and other pages dedicated to the topic I know will have what interests me. If you know a site doesn’t have an RSS feed, or if Pipes is having trouble figuring out how to parse it, you can try out Feedity which takes any site and creates an RSS page out of its changes, quite a useful trick for those content creators behind the curve.

5. What happens to your feeds

Now that all those discovered feeds are fed into their respective loops, they are then piped through the “Union” widget, which pools all the outputs together. After that, it’s through the “Unique” widget which makes sure that if the same story is pulled from two sources (say, Aruba and Cisco are both mentioned in one story picked up by Google News) you only get the link once.

Once all that is done, it’s piped to “Pipe Output,” which is where we get our final product, which we can now proudly view by clicking save and “Run Pipe.”

6. Getting real-time updates by IM or txt message

There's a lot of services out there that claim to convert RSS to IMs, but the only one I found working when I wrote this was Inezha. I have no idea what the name means, but it's fairly simple to sign up and have it convert your Yahoo! Pipes output page to chats. You can set the interval for updates by typing "Timer" and then the time, in minutes, between updates you want.

For those who are really brave, Yahoo! has an option to add a mobile device and get text message alerts: Just click “Results by Email or Phone.”

Phew. And we’re finally done! You can see my final product, and feel free to leave any questions or tips of your own in the comments, or check out further reading for some other ideas and advanced Pipes techniques.

Further Reading:

Yahoo!’s video walkthrough and introduction to Pipes
One experiment to try and turn a Pipe into a live audio feed, something I’d like to try to do to create a police scanner feel.
A few journalism-related Yahoo! Pipes resources

A moment of weakness

michael morisy — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:06:35 +0800

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.