Nothing particularly new to fans of The RSS Network in an article on how RSS, "...will re-shape the way online news is published...", by Caroline White. However, the explanation of RSS and aggregation is nice and tight. Also, lists some major media, "...offering their own news feeds, or employing journalists who do..." Now why'd she have to go and add that last little bit?!
Not a big fan of going meta in this space, but please observe a moment of silence for the death of my 10 day posting streak...
...
Okay back to work.
In an article describing his new role at Harvard, Dave Winer fires on the journalistic establishment again, claiming that weblogs are replacing traditional media organizations. Obviously, in a macro sense I agree with him, but I have one major point which I've never seen raised and which tempers my enthusiasm.
Due to their standing and reputation, major news organizations have access privileges that mere mortals don't.
Of the following two phone calls to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. which one has a higher chance of getting through?
Hi, I'm J. Random Luser. I'm working on a piece about Mr. Bush and would like to verify some quotes.
Hi, I'm J. Random Luser with The New York Times. We're working on a piece about Mr. Bush and would like to verify some quotes.
Winer's analysis focuses on extremely public events which require no access privileges. Anyone can watch and report. This breaks down when you need to get into the board room, the locker room, the committee meetings, etc.
Memo to self: hijack NetLogo for large scale multi-agent simulation of media effects
Andrew Holovaty notes some interestingly subversive usage of online interaction in support of a newspaper 's mission of keeping the public trust. At least subversive is how I interpret it. Frankly, politics and technology while combustible, is one of computing's final frontiers. Maybe journalism and online media is the entree.
The stuff Holovaty is doing is so cheap, technologically, that every damn newspaper should do it.
All I have to say is damn straight!!
If you know me, you know why this Atlantic Monthly article on introverts is so relevant. If you don't know me, read it to get a taste of what I'm like.
Either way pay attention!!
More mojo and motivation for MochaTime: NTT DoCoMo announces that i-Mode will support Flash.
I'm actually conflicted. More Flash engines in the world is good (really). Flash on a phone is pretty crappy.
But on a PDA? Me gusta!
Dr. Paul Carter highlights some common pitfalls for novice C programmers. Given I have to teach the second quarter of the CS intro sequence next quarter this might actually be useful. Via Duncan's Jotter.
Memo to self: get to to work on that CS 211 syllabus.
The paper of record adds it's two cents on the Google purchase of Pyra. Even the intrepid Gray Lady can't do much more than "future too cloudy." Mostly they pick up on the various ideas kicking through The RSS Network (TM).
I'm sticking to the network news weather service, knowledge management tools, publishing thought leader cocktail as what Google wanted to slurp. Nothing individually distinctive but the whole kit n' caboodle tastes mighty nice.
Pivot is a weblogging tool completely written in PhP. One more thing to feature compare with MovableType. The programmatic Perl API to MovableType is still the secret weapon standard. Via Steve Mallett.
Don Park ruminates on restarting the currently defunct SF Examiner with a stable of webloggers. This echoes something I'd like to throw into the lexicon that I'm calling Emergent Journalism.
I have no illusions that the idea is particularly brilliant, especially since I just cooked up the term today, but the premise is this. Can a horde of cheap, bad reporters be steered, guided, influenced into generating some coherent patterns that emulate what we currently think of as "journalism"? The protozoic forms of this are Advogato, Slashdot, and Plastic. But what are the patterns of journalism?
In short, naysayers always focus on the micro level of individual namebrand webloggers, e.g. Glenn Reynolds. Is there anyway we can see the macro level and is there actually anything to see?
Question: What the heck does a defunct SF Examiner actually bring to the table? No money, no distribution channels, no advertisers, some administration and editors. Doesn't look like much.
Answer: Cachet, imprimatur, and reputation. Things that it looks like will take a while for a community of webloggers to earn.
Memo to major media: look out for that meteor!
Joi Ito's "Emergent Democracy" will be making the rounds. Looks like a buzzword compliant combination of swarm, power law, weblog, intellectual property, social networks and government. Coming from the Rheingold School of society and technology, I'm not sure about the depth. Actually I'll clamp up here, because I'm a big advocate of reading something before firing on it.
Memo to self: read closely, then fire.
Being a bit of a journalism outsider, I've missed Mike Ward's Journalism Online site and book. Scanning the table of contents it looks highly relevant to education in Medill, although the last couple of chapters focus on down and dirty web site development.
I wonder if taking up the cause of preventing journalists from building web sites would lead to martyrdom or sainthood. Teaching HTML to journalists, just say no! It's almost like teaching them to make their own paper.
Memo to self: investigate further.
Chris Adamson wrote a great article on manipulating QuickTime files using Java APIs. The article goes in depth on how to read the QuickTime file structure with Java and similarly how to write out QuickTime files. Also, there's mention that MPEG-4 is roughly QuickTime based so the same techniques can apply for what looks like might be the winning next generation multimedia document format. Apparently MPEG-4 has hooks to program interactivity through Java.
Adamson also points to an Apple tutorial on QuickTime, which helps in interpreting the structure and varied leaf nodes of a QuickTime file.
Memo to self: there's at least one popular multimedia file format that MochaTime could target
Not a while lot of time left, but the deadline for paper submissions to Association of Internet Researchers 2003 Conference hasn't passed. Mar 1 in case you're wondering. Conference held in October in Toronto.
Boy USC and Berkeley don't make it easy to find out information about their annual New Media Conference. Actually, the problem may just be that Google is stuck on last year's conference as the top ranked page for those terms.
In any event, the lineup looks interesting and this year's focus is on the Net Generation, Gaming, and the news. Best of all, no registration needed, but a headsup e-mail (address on conference site) is requested.
Previously I blogged about NewsMonster. With a closer look all is not peaches and cream. NewsMonster is Mozilla based, so it's portable, but reports have it that how it operates is somewhat opaque.
Even worse, NewsMonster has an offline reading component, that crawls and downloads links embedded in RSS. As Mark Pilgrim has discovered, NewsMonster doesn't honor robots.txt. This is simply bad form and brainless.
However, it does bring up interesting questions regarding what a news aggregator is allowed to do. In some sense, what's the difference between NewsMonster and NetNewsWire + Chimera working together? Not much, other than tight integration between the aggregator and Web browser.
More to come...
Digging through old e-mail, I found a link in Red Rock Eater for a conference on Archives & Museum Informatics. A quick scan indicates it's definitely not run by the traditional CS junta, but claims to be the premier conference on cultural institutions and the Web.
Since I'm working on a Web oriented project and class about the 1909 Plan of Chicago this might be an appropriate venue to report on what Carl Smith, Jonathan Smith and I have learned.
Memo to self: review current and prior technical programs for this conference.
I've long been an adherent of "the only good writing is rewriting school." Which is somewhat anathema in the weblog community. Chip Scanlan, a writing coach at the Poynter Institute, has crystallized, better than I could, a number of salient reasons to plan and think around rewriting. Nothing earth shattering but it's always comforting to know that I'm in line with the guys who have to write on a daily basis.
Memo to self: reedit some of these older weblog entries.
The news that Google bought Pyra, implementers and service providers for Blogger, has been kicking around The RSS Network for a few days. It's a big net out there, but here's a question I have.
Why didn't they buy UserLand, LiveJournal, or Six Apart?
LiveJournal has a huge user community, but is mostly a grass roots, open source effort. There's really nothing to buy.
Some will claim that Dave Winer's irascible personality might preclude purchase by anybody. That would be bad business and I'm guessing wouldn't matter to Google. Mavericks and Google go together. Plus, UserLand has been marketing Radio Userland as a knowledge logging tool, making it buzzword compliant for a number of corporations. The UserLand blogging code base is mostly in UserTalk, a language which is probably a bit foreign to Google. Digesting UserLand would be easier from the user base perspective, but harder from the code base perspective.
Six Apart is more interesting. MovableType is currently the most popular tool of thought leaders in the weblogging community. Especially those working on infrastructure hacks, although content folks are starting to swing around too. It's amazingly well engineered and Perl isn't completely anathema to Google. The team is small and well respected. The only missing piece of the puzzle is a large centralized community of users.
Conclusion: Google wanted a community to help better guide Google News. As a bonus, they get a codebase that they can easily digest and turn into a corporate product. On top of it all, by making Blogger more reliable, Google does good for a large number of users. The Blogger team still has a bit of a rep and they can call upon the Google smarties to try and get back out in front of, or at least near, the technology leaders.
Oh, and they beat Microsoft and AOL to the weblogging tool punch.
NewsRoom looks like competition for nusroom, or a potential platform to hijack.
Memo to self: investigate closely.
Just when I thought I had 2.5 figured out, the Trotts go and release MovableType 2.6. Now I'll have to go and upgrade.
On second thought, wait for a few bugfix releases. V2.62 is probably more my speed.
Brent Simmons describes how he gets one click subscription from a Web page to NetNewsWire.
Memo to self: Can Chimera do that?
A paper in IEEE Internet Computing describes the recommendation technique that Amazon uses, entitled Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering.
Steve Mallett opines on the conjecture that humans have a "social capacity" of about 150 people in a community before they face overload. He seems to find compelling argument from Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" and Johnson's "Emergence...". I'm not sure if I buy it, but it's worth pursuing the original sources.
Memo to self: Read "The Tipping Point" and "Emergence". Yes, I'm ashamed, but ignorance is correctable.
From Computer World's Hong Kong edition comes a slightly different take on the potential success of Tablet PCs. Conclusion? This is version 2.0 for Microsoft, so the next round will actually be good. Also, the devices can't compete with specialized devices for data entry but might be useful in vertical markets where an organization can't afford an R&D budget to build such devices.
Worst of all the dang things still have that prissy PC mentality. If you drop it, it's all over. Definitely a drag on utility.
Then again, maybe MMRPGs aren't all that. Seems like 'The Sims Online' ain't doing so hot. The article is fairly vague on reasons why, but the general theme of "nothing to do" came across. Seems to me an economy of activities built out of extensible mechanisms might help these guys out.
Newsday provides some statistical grist for the decreasing newspaper audience mill. Of note is the fast decline in the youth demographic, yet the fact that newspapers still provide the best penetration across many media, including the Internet.
Not exactly new to those who have been keeping an eye on these things, but in these troubled times there are more instances of social activism spilling into Massively Multiplayer Online Games.
Now making the rounds is Clay Shirky's analysis of how weblog linkage will eventually follow the Power Law relationships seen in many other areas of computing. The gist is "them that has gets, them that don't don't".
Memo to self: read closely and note results here.
Lots of interesting nuggets in a teaser for Japan Media Review provided by the Online Journalism Review. Apparently, Japanese cell phone companies are targeting a new make of edge devices as a lucrative news content delivery platform. These things run Java and support downloadable applet type code. That must have Microsoft's panties in a bunch. Also, they can run background processes that have 'Net connectivity. Perfect microclients for the nusroom of the future.
Memo to the US. In regards to innovative cellular thinking, as Drew Barrymore says "And that's kicking your ass."
I didn't know Ed Felten ran a weblog. Apparently it's been going since we met at the DARPA ISAT Summer Study. If he can do a good job at one of these things, then I have absolutely no excuse.
Thanks to Adrian Holovaty, I now have another trove of usability informtion, besides Jakob Nielsen. It looks like the Software Usability Research Lab, out of Wichita State, is providing a nice, online, peer reviewed venue for usability findings: UsabilityNews. The work appears to be indpendent of The Web, but quite applicable.
Newspaper operations are in a tizzy thanks to some success with Tablet PC delivery by magazines, according to Editor & Publisher. Towards the end of the article, a few publishing concerns claim that they can easily automate the task of converting pages into a format readable by Zinio's PDF-reader-on-steroids.
That's great, but a dead page is still a dead page. The point of putting the dang thing on a TabletPC is so that it can be interacted with. Otherwise it's Worse Than Paper (TM). Not going to be able to make it better by automated processing from pre-print. Heck, I can't even see a path to incorporating interesting Flash like dynamic content, which, while irritating, might actually be a step forward.
Fuji is now pushing yet another storage card format, especially for digital film. xD-Picture Cards are being touted as really small, really light, and really fast. My eye popped at the 8GB upper limit, with 5MB/sec read times and 3MB/sec write times. That's USB scales, I think, in something the size of coinage. And screw pictures, that's a whole lot of digital news and MP3s. The iPod could get even smaller!
The preceding note on The New York Times Online came to NMH from WebWord.com via 37Signals, Signal v Noise weblog.
Memo to self: add each one's RSS feeds to our NetNewsWire subscriptions.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that The New York Times is going to design its online pages to be much more like print pages. The article is a bit disingenuous in that the new design is sort of like NY Times print pages but is a little more inspired by opposite page ads in magazines. The nav will be pushed to the top, left side used for editorial, right side for advertising.
Warning. WSJ registration/lockdown/linkrot will probably occur. Hopefully, the same bits will show up in some other channel.
Memo to self: fork over the dough for WSJOnline.
Two digital paper companies, E Ink and Gyricon Media are still pursuing the dream. Thanks to the economy though, they're now a little less pie in the sky and more focused on the bottom line.
WriteTheWeb, a blog about many differing aspects of writing on the Web, has returned.
JD Lasica documents Google News failures in tracking the space shuttle Columbia story. Of course, if you ask me I'd tell you that a) Google News has to trail real outlets because it works off of their pages, and b) Google News fails because it doesn't watch what people are actually reading.
Too bad I wasn't thinking, or I would have tracked what plain Google gave as the top sites for a few keywords. Would Google Search beat out Google News?