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errands / links / Monday — Comments Off
19
Jul 10

Now appearing in the garage

Finally made it into the garage project. I said last August I’d do this. I’ve intended to do it from time to time in between. To be fair, other things have happened along the way. I meant to do it last week, but didn’t feel well. (I’m getting better. Now I merely sound stuffy and can’t breathe as much as I like. I like to breathe.)

So I made it into the garage, which has made a nice storage space. Of course it was 95 degrees out as I did this. The box fan wasn’t really getting the job done.

But I threw away three big garbage bags and a box full of things. I donated an entire car full of items to the Salvation Army. I sweated a lot. There are about four more boxes to go through, but this was a day of progress. Needed one of those.

In an unrelated adventure, I managed to explode the garbage bax with kitty litter in it. I felt like a thief when I was sweeping up the trail, covering my tracks as it were. I felt like an idiot when I realized I leaked some of it into the trunk of my car. Something else to clean up.

In journalism news the spin you see coming out of this story will require a complete and utter divorce from reality and credulity:

(V)isits to The Times of London and The Sunday Times’ Websites have dropped by 66% since parent company News International put those sites behind paywalls on July 2.

Information, it seems, wants to be free. So now we’ll join former boss Jeff Jarvis, mid-explanation:

But that is based on the assumption that content is a consumable, a scarcity that drains the more it is read. Of course, it isn’t. Content is, instead, a magnet that can create relationships of value; whether that happens is up to the creator of the content and the quality of service and relevance is gives. That, dare I repeat it, is the basis of the link economy.

But note the verb that started off the paragraph above: should. Readers who read more should pay more. This is the product of journalism’s sense of entitlement.

Jarvis concluded, in this January post, that the “risks (of paywalls) are great and grave.” Why? The change, Jarvis answers:

(W)ill have me make a new economic decision every time I want to read a story: Is this unique content I will get only here (there is a good deal of that) or is this commodity information I can get elsewhere (BBC, Reuters, Washington Post, Politico, TechCrunch…). The Times then restricts our relationship and it is in that relationship that it has to find value.

Publishers, if they wanted to make money online, missed the window by a little more than a decade. There’s a hope that apps will flip the model back in their favor, but there also be someone in the app stores (or whatever surpasses them) willing to spread news or sports or entertainment for free?

Jarvis talks about that, too. Peter-Paul Koch touches on the economics.

My thoughts and research are typically more geared to the journalism side rather than the business aspects, but these are important considerations throughout the industry. I’ll let you know when I have all of the answers.

Maybe the spies know. Here’s Wired’s read on the much anticipated Washington Post spy database collection:

It includes a searchable database cataloging what an estimated 854,000 employees and legions of contractors are apparently up to. Users can now to see just how much money these government agencies are spending and where those top secret contractors are located.

Check out the Post’s nine-page list of agencies and contractors involved in air and satellite observations, for instance. No wonder it scares the crap out of official Washington: It’s bound to provoke all sorts of questions — both from taxpayers wondering where their money goes and from U.S. adversaries looking to penetrate America’s spy complex.

But this piece is about much more than dollars.

Go read it over there. I’ve talked about spies enough for one day already.

Hope you had a great, kitty-litter free, Monday today and a great Tuesday waiting for you!

errands / links / Wednesday — Comments Off
14
Jul 10

Still unwell

Remember how, yesterday, I didn’t feel too hot? That continues today.

Did manage to clean out a section of the garage. It seems we had more kitchenware than we needed. I’ve had a quality bachelor kitchen in boxes for years, inherited a lot of things from my lovely mother and then added The Yankee’s to the mix as well. We’ve been trying to offload it for a year to someone who might need bowls, silverware, pitchers and various other useful and decorative things. What didn’t get shipped off to individuals got donated today.

And I just realized there’s an entire plate set somewhere I didn’t discover today.

So I loaded up the car for a garbage run. And then I returned and used every free space in the car for a trip to the Salvation Army.

Unloaded it, watched the guys at the Salvation Army loading bay critique my offerings, got my receipt and then turned to home. About halfway between here and there the not feeling good returned. I was just wiped out.

So I spent most of the rest of the day relaxing. Still have the medicine head, still have the fatigue. A trip up the stairs was enough to leave ready for a break.

Sports Illustrated takes advantage of a new delivery method. The world continues to spin as only the old media are stunned by this new flexibility.

Print readers get a cover featuring LeBron James and his new teammates. But anyone who buys the iPad version will see a cover story on Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who died this week.

News of Steinbrenner’s death broke early Tuesday morning, a half-day after Sports Illustrated’s conventional issue had gone to the printers. After a relatively quick conversation, says editor Terry McDonell, the magazine staff decided to give the iPad edition a new cover, along with a story by Tom Verducci.

“We all sort of looked at other, and said, ‘you know, this is an opportunity to do this,’ and why wouldn’t we?” McDonell says.

Everyone else knew it was both an eventuality and a logical conclusion. However, the story reaches a disappointing conclusion. “Time Warner’s magazine doesn’t plan on making a habit out of it. If you want up-to-date sports news, SI doesn’t expect you to rely on the iPad.”

Swing and a miss.

Which came first? Science now says, based on a protein found in chicken ovaries, that it was the poultry. Unless it was the egg. Not unsurprisingly this creates a great debate among commenters, who do not consider the discussion closed. In fact there’s the Biblical wing, the science could do something more useful side, the “they got it wrong” angle, the epistemological and more.

The best one, though: “I resolved this issue to my own satisfaction when I realized that no egg ever laid a chicken.”

Makes perfect sense.

links / Monday / Samford / World Cup — Comments Off
28
Jun 10

Monday stuff

Now it makes perfect sense. It is only because you watch that there are problems with this World Cup. Look away, world, the poor officiating and obvious errors will go away. FIFA is infuriating. Even so, the games continue. Netherlands struggled to play their game and steal beat Slovakia easily. They are rapidly becoming a favorite of the remaining teams.

The Flying Dutchmen will face Brazil, who offed Chile 3-0. Suddenly, in the quarterfinals, we’ll have one of the matches of the tournament.

At the gym this evening I ran a 7:30 mile. That was painful, think I’ll have to dial it down from there. I only rode 10 miles on the bike. Showered, visited the grocery store and picked up a few things for the next few days. I felt like a big boy because I found the capers all by myself. I even told the cashier when he asked if I’d found everything OK. He was impressed, too.

And then I spent the evening working on the outcome assessment program for Samford. We test graduates on law, quantitative and qualitative. I’ve spent the last week or so harassing grads to return the material, so I can grade it. I’ve spent an hour or two telling people “No, you’ve graduated. This is for us. You can keep your diploma.”

Since there’s not much else I’ll leave you with a few things I’m reading today. From the oil spill there comes research opportunities. Anyone up for helping me brainstorm ideas? I don’t think there’s a lot of research there for me, but I’m sure there will come some great work from it.

Reasons the Sentinel and Philly.com have added mobile jobs:

“If there’s breaking news, you need to make sure it’s on mobile first and then online,” (Tribune Interactive’s Mobile Product Manager Jeff) Dalo said. “By having a mobile manager, you have someone who’s responsible for making sure that happens.”

Increasingly, mobile is where users tend to get their news. A recent Morgan Stanley study found that mobile users will surpass desktop Internet users by 2014 and that the mobile Web is growing much faster than desktop Internet usage ever did.

Maybe newsrooms will come around faster this time, too. The final quote in the piece: “If you don’t have someone responsible for your mobile content and parts of the revenue side of it, then who’s going to take responsibility for that?” (Philly.com President Ryan Davis) said by phone. “We hear so much about mobile and it’s because it’s so useful and because it enables us to reach people and places that we never could before. It has tremendous potential.”

Jeff Jarvis redefines, and defines down, hot news:

The most dangerous defensive tactic parried by legacy news organizations today is their attempt to claim ownership of “hot news” and prevent others from repeating what they gather at their expense for as long as they determine that news is still hot. It is a threat to free speech and the First Amendment and our doctrines of copyright and fair use. It is a threat to news.

[…]

Hot news is ridiculously obsolete. What’s hot today? As Tom Glocer, head of Thomson Reuters, said, his news is most valuable for “miliseconds.”

News, it’s gathering, the architecture of dissemination, it’s perception, audience, everything has changed in the 90 years since hot news was defined. In that view Jarvis is right, and change is past due. We’ve already seen it in practice and now it is left to the courts. Jarvis distills this down to rights. As he notes in his own comments “Considering that PEOPLE now send more links than aggregators — via Twitter and Facebook and blogs and such — do you think they, too, should be stopped? I doubt that.”

Want something webby? Fifty Powerful Time-Savers for Web Designers. There’s some good stuff in there for you.

And, finally, a delicious flank steak recipe.