"journalism" entries

Coming to Grips with the "Unthinkable" in Publishing

by Andrew Savikas | @andrewsavikas | +Andrew Savikas | March 18, 2009

While much of the Twitter chatter this past weekend was about the annual South by Southwest festival and conference, there was quite a bit of "retweeting" of links to a post by Clay Shirky: During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller…

Four short links: 27 Feb 2009

Four short links: 27 Feb 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 27, 2009

The Economist in Chinese, online news, concurrency, and community. Have a great weekend!

  1. Translating the Economist — Andy Baio reports on a Chinese electronic community that, each week, splits up and translates The Economist articles into Chinese. The DIY ethos here, “we want this, it’s not here yet, let’s make it happen”, is tremendous.
  2. Business Models of News — excellent insight into the travails of newspaper business. “In essence to secure the advertising for the print edition, they have in the past completely undermined the business they need to survive in the future. They have told every one of their advertisers that online adverts are not worth paying for.” (via Julie Starr)
  3. Embracing Concurrency — Ignite UK North talk on parallel coding, at a high and clear level, by Michael Sparks of BBC R&D, who is also author of Kamaelia.
  4. Things I’ve Learned From Hacker News — Paul Graham on social and community lessons from running Hacker News. “Probably the most important thing I’ve learned about dilution is that it’s measured more in behavior than users. It’s bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa.”
Four short links: 26 Feb 2009

Four short links: 26 Feb 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 26, 2009

Three stories about old-media in new-media age, and some patent goblins to leave a bad taste in your mouth:

  1. The Kindle Swindle — the Authors Guild president argues that the robot voice of the Kindle does away with audiobook royalty streams, lucrative for some titles. Doesn’t mention the vast majority of books for which there is no audiobook. Creators have attempted to regulate use with licenses, but I think the plasticity of bits argues against this being possible for much longer. Now “audiobook”-ness is a feature of the device, not a feature of the retailed artistic work, and the question is not only how to charge for it but whether it makes sense to continue to charge for it. Neil Gaiman, by the way, doesn’t feel the same way as the head of the Author’s Guild.
  2. If You Want to Save Newspapers, Learn to Love Your iPhones — a long Observer piece about the “future of newspapers”, reinvention in the mobile age, subscription models, the curse of Google, etc. Many great quotes, for example: “Google is great for Google, but it’s terrible for content providers, because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively. And if you are going to get people to pay for content, you have to encourage them to make qualitative decisions about that content.” — Robert Thomson, the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal.
  3. NYT ArticleSkimmer — reminscent, vaguely, of Arts & Letters Daily, the original “big heap o’ content” page. Between this and Big Picture, I’m enjoying the experimentation in online newspaper formats.
  4. Microsoft Sues TomTom Over Patents, Including Linux Kernel — Microsoft patented elements of the FAT filesystem, including the system for representing long filenames on systems that only handle 8.3 filenames like CRAPWARE.EXE. This filesystem is used in pretty much every digital camera and Flash filesystem device, and the TomTom system in question. This Ars Digita article raises the interesting possibility that the Open Invention Network could respond by flexing its patent portfolio muscles and make it clear that nobody wants a battle over patents (except lawyers who are paid by the hour).

Radar Interview with Clay Shirky

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | February 16, 2009

Clay Shirky is one of the most incisive thinkers on technology and its effects on business and society. I had the pleasure to sit down with him after his keynote at the FASTForward '09 conference last week in Las Vegas. In this interview Clay talks about the effects of low cost coordination and group action, where to find the next layer of value when many professions are being disrupted by the Internet, and the necessary role of low cost experimentation in finding new business models.

Four short links: 11.5 Feb 2009

Four short links: 11.5 Feb 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 11, 2009

This second Feb 11 post was brought to you by the intersection of timezones and technology. If there’s a third Feb 11 post, I’m changing my name to Bill Murray.

  1. Hacking the Earth — an environmental futurist looks at “geoengineering”, deliberately interfering with the Earth’s systems to terraform the planet. Radical solution to global warming, unwise hubris and immoral act of the highest folly, or all of the above? (via Matt Jones)
  2. Reinvention Draws Near for Newsweek — fascinating look at how Newsweek are refocusing their magazine. “If we don’t have something original to say, we won’t. The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.” gives me hope. Newsweek are hoping to target fewer but richer advertisers, essentially a business strategy of tapping existing customers for more. This feels like they’re ceding the contested parts of their business (commodity news stories) and doubling down on the bits that nobody else is fighting for yet (their columnists, pictures, whitespace). What else could they do? Possibly nothing (see Innovator’s Dilemma), but the alternative is figuring out something new that people want and giving them that. Easy to say, hard for anyone to do.
  3. Tinkerkit – a physical computing kit for designers. Arduino-compatible components for rapid prototyping. Sweet!
  4. Stanford University YouTube Channel — short interesting talks by Stanford researchers. Brains on chips, stem cells to fight deafness, and brain imagery are some of the first up there. The talks aren’t condescending or vague, they’re aimed at “a bright and curious audience”, as the Mind Hacks blog post about them put it.
Four short links: 30 Jan 2009

Four short links: 30 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 30, 2009

Two serious links and two fun today, thanks to Waxy and BoingBoing:

  1. EveryBlock Business Model Brainstorming — Adrian Holovaty’s project was funded by a Knight Foundation grant that’s about to run out. The software will be open sourced but he’s inviting suggestions of business models that would enable the project team to continue working on it full-time. Having used and created open source to show newspaper companies how to do journalism online, will he now work on an open source way for them to make money?
  2. Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites — Leonard Lin lays out what’s required in systems and platforms for modern web sites. Perl succeeded in part because its data types were the things you had to deal with (files, text, sockets). Will the next gen of tools (the ‘Rails killer’ if you will) offer users, taggable objects, social objects, etc. as primitives?
  3. Academic Earth — takes open courseware from different universities and integrates them into a coherent UI. Transcripts. Slurp.
  4. Love2D — a Lua-based 2D game engine. I’m looking at it to see whether it works for me as the next step for 9 year-old kids interesting in programming games in my computer club.
Four short links: 27 Jan 2009

Four short links: 27 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 27, 2009

Fantasy, feedback, facts, and flies, all will be revealed in today’s links of loops and life:

  1. Blueful – a story told in text, but delivered through the medium of web sites. It’s like an xkcd cartoon embodied in the web. Interesting, artistic, and makes you look at web sites in a new way. From Aaron A. Reed.
  2. The Case Against Candy Land – Steven Johnson talks about how dull the children’s games of our youth are. “What’s irritating about the games is that they are exercises in sheer randomness. It’s not that they fail to sharpen any useful skills; it’s that they make it literally impossible for a player to acquire any skills at all.” Every process in life should have a feedback loop that lets you get better at it.
  3. Journo Data – a Guardian journalist publishes data resources about the US economy as Google spreadsheets. This is the start of something interesting, where the raw data is available from journalists not just the (textual or programmatic) interpretation. As mentioned in the fantastic presentation Tim just linked to, access to the data behind our world view is essential if we are to critically assess that world view.
  4. Userfly – a usability tool that records and then recreates your users’ sessions on your web site, so you can see where and when they type, click on, backtrack, etc. (via RWW)
Four short links: 21 Jan 2009

Four short links: 21 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 21, 2009

In today’s edition: the spread of fake news, keeping track of your real power use, a Javascript library
and a less-than-impressed take on mobile location apps.

  1. Echo Chamber – the British tabloid The Sun posted a story that turned out to be fabricated. This site tracked that story’s spread and uncritical acceptance by other news outlets and web sites.
  2. Real Time Web-Based Power Charting – build the software and hardware to get a live chart in a web page that updates every 10 seconds with the instantaneous power usage for your entire house.
  3. ActiveRecordJS – just what it sounds like, ActiveRecord for Javascript. AR is a complex subsystem of Rails, and it’s interesting to see the functionality ported to Javascript.
  4. I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment with the Location-Aware Lifestyle – a reporter tries all the location apps, and discovers the future isn’t all here yet. Interesting: only three paragraphs of this long story are about the good bits of location services, the rest question its implementation, privacy, and utility.
Four short links: 14 Jan 2009

Four short links: 14 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 14, 2009

Something beautiful, something informative, something mindblowing, something revealing: something for everyone in today’s link set.

  1. Trees and Forests on Old Russian Maps – old maps, like old books, are works of art. I loved this collection of symbols; it reminded me how much creativity and beauty we’ve lost (temporarily, I hope) in modern maps.
  2. Distinguishing Decorative from Meaningful Elements in UI Design – as a thoughtless cloth-eyed coder who designs CSS with the same care and attention that a boar on Viagra devotes to lovemaking, I appreciate this detailed explanation of why a simple design choice (a border around something) turns out to have been the wrong thing to do.
  3. Interview with Clay Shirky and Part 2 – from Columbia Journalism Review. This is as good as the Bruce Sterling improv on the future from last week. Every paragraph has a philosophically sound quotable nugget. This is about the future of newspapers, the fiction of “information overload”, the bogosity of Luddism, and a fine fine rebuttal to Nick Carr’s Google stupidity.
  4. Sampling Twitter – serious geekery by Dewitt Clinton, who tried to sample the Twitter ID space for an indication of representative user behaviour–follows, friends, active, etc. “Again extrapolating for accounts too new to test and private accounts, this suggests that 23% of all assigned ids, and thus 6.8% of all potential user ids, are assigned to someone who is posting regularly, is following other users, and is being followed by at least one other user. This implies that there there are up to 1,200,000-1,300,000 active, connected users on Twitter.”
Four short links: 9 Jan 2009

Four short links: 9 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 8, 2009

Four questions, one per link: what next, can it solve a big problem, what’s the final boss for Python programming, and why on earth would anyone want yogurt that glows in the dark?

  1. End Times – gloomy piece on the future of journalism, to be added to the large pile of other gloomy pieces on the future of journalism (e.g., Bad News, Good News). The critical problem is still how to pay for journalism if the new media revenues are significant lower than old, and if the new media economics decree that journalism is dead then who fills the social good role that journalism’s death will leave?
  2. Ward Cunningham’s Visible Workings – an intriguing glimpse, from March last year, into the way Ward lays out web interactions. Nice system for laying out these interactions, but it’s also fascinating for how it makes transparent what will happen as a result of the data you submit. How scalable is this? Could it tackle privacy?
  3. Project Euler – fun programming exercises that require more than math to finish. We learn by doing, not by reading, so interesting exercises are part and parcel of training. It’s interesting to see educators are moving from being authors to being game designers, providing a series of staged challenges that make us stronger by defeating them. I’m presently dieing in as many ways as I can while learning iterators and generators in Python, as a way of ensuring I have Python’s “game physics” sussed.
  4. Rise of the Garage Genome Hackers – more on hobbyist molecular biology. It mentions DIYBio, the Cambridge biohacker collective that I first heard about at BioBarCamp. (via Glynn Moody)