Month: May 2009

Bookmarks for May 12th through May 15th

In order to share what I’ve found to be useful/interesting/etc. while browsing around below are my links for May 12th through May 15th. You can find my full set of bookmarks at my Delicious account.

  • Wolfram|Alpha – Amazing site that takes a totally new approach to the modern search engine. Instead of returning a list of links it returns a list of data. In the few examples that I tried it against Google it proved to be exponentially more useful. If I were Google I would be calling these guys and seeing how much they want.
  • Build an Auto-Scrolling Slideshow That Works With and Without JavaScript – Another great Nettuts tutorial for creating a sliding image slideshow that works with or without javascript. Would be perfect for part of the Pio homepage for next year.
  • Conditional Tags – WordPress Codex – The list of conditional tags in WordPress. This will be useful for customizing the display of ads in the sidebar of the new Pioneer design.

Critiquing the Times Reader or: They still don’t get it

The big news from the New York Times today was the release of Times Reader, their cross platform application for reading the news. Built on the Adobe AIR framework it attempts to provide a solution for reading the Times on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

A lot has been made about the efforts by the Times to adapt to a digital model for news that is profitable. Many see the Times Reader as a step toward distributing content in a way that could provide for the ability to better monetize content. Here’s the reality though: the Times Reader represents just one more step taken by the New York Times that illustrates how this company just doesn’t get online news.

A misunderstanding of reading on the web

An article in the Times Reader

The narrow columns make reading an article block-like and tiring.

The Times apparently worked extremely hard to get the app to mimic the look of the print edition. While this may be understandable, since the print edition is the shining example of what made the New York Times the pillar of American journalism that it likes to think it is, it ultimately shows an utter disregard for how content is read on a computer screen.

The narrow columns create a line length that just appears block-like and is quite frankly hard to read. While narrow columns may be great to quickly scan a story excerpt they are awful for any sustained article. They tire the eyes and in my opinion break up the flow of the text.

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Bookmarks for May 10th

In order to share what I’ve found to be useful/interesting/etc. while browsing around below are my links for May 10th. You can find my full set of bookmarks at my Delicious account.

  • The end of the age of free – Simply because large media corps. like Murdoch are adopting a pay model doesn't mean that they will remain the large media corps. Those who can make free work will come to dominate. My two cents at least.
  • Your brain is an index. – All the more reason for moving the education system away from detailed and isolated fields of study. Convergence and inter-disciplinary thought is what's needed and that's not a bad thing.
  • A List Apart: Articles – Taking the Guesswork Out of Design – Very interesting concepts from A List Apart concerning planning a user experience and design for a website. Their idea about assigning point values to page elements is a good one. Good to have in mind while working on stuff for the Whitman Pioneer.

Bookmarks for May 9th

In order to share what I’ve found to be useful/interesting/etc. while browsing around below are my links for May 9th. You can find my full set of bookmarks at my Delicious account.

Is it really “The end of the age of free”?

Vanessa Thorpe of The Observer wrote an article today titled “The end of the age of free.” In it she gives a couple quotes from Chris Anderson, the EIC of Wired:

For Anderson, the changes that lie ahead are more complex than simply introducing entry fees at a few gates on the web. Instead, he is predicting the twin birth of a “reputation economy” and a “time economy”, to exist alongside the battered old “money economy”. As a result, value will be assessed differently by both providers and consumers.

Toward the end of the article Thorpe also quotes Bill Thompson (one of the initial designers and architects of The Guardian’s site) who says that:

“I don’t think we will look back at 2009 and think that was when it all changed,” he says. “We might look back, though, and see that this was the moment when several senior executives realised they needed to change.”

While I’m not entirely positive precisely what Anderson means by “reputation” and “time” I think that his assessment as portrayed by Thorpe is pretty good.

With the big news (and critiques that followed it) that Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp companies will be looking at setting up pay-for-content models this article is even more interesting.

While 2009 certainly looks to be a year of significant change for media, and news organizations in particular, I also don’t think it will be the tipping point. However, it will be an immensely important year to the future of journalism and consequently must be one of progress.

With announcements like Murdoch’s it’s worrisome that some of the senior executives of MSM still “just don’t get it.” Without seeing the fundamental paradigm shift in economies that is necessary in order for journalism to prosper (which I think it can) these senior executives will simply end up running their companies, employees, and stock holders into the ground.

Perhaps that’s a good thing. Perhaps it will leave more room of innovative start-ups. However, I would like to believe what Thompson says about some corporate media beginning to get it. I think that the reputation of an organization like News Corp or the NY Times could be used to leverage some significant innovation and legitimacy in the online world.

The more I hear statements like Murdoch’s and news like the relationship between the NY Times and Carlos Slim the more I find this acknowledgement of a new economy for news by media executives to be unlikely if not impossible. Here’s hoping though, for everyone’s sake.

Bookmarks for May 7th through May 9th

In order to share what I’ve found to be useful/interesting/etc. while browsing around below are my links for May 7th through May 9th. You can find my full set of bookmarks at my Delicious account.

  • Create A Tabbed Interface Using jQuery – Nettuts+ – A tutorial for creating a really slick tabbed interface. Nice way to recreate the Popular/Recent/Comments box that is in most of the WooThemes for WordPress.
  • TubeMogul.com – Allows for you to upload a video just once and then have it pushed to all video sites (YouTube, Vimeo, blip.tv, etc.). Could be very useful to get the best aspects of all video sites. (via @joeybaker)
  • Kill-a-Watt and Other Products That Actually Help – A follow up to the previous post from GOOD. This provides some suggestions as to what products do actually have a significantly positive effect upon the environment.
  • Don’t Buy Green – An interesting article about how "green consumerism" in some ways encourages consumers to simply be worse for the environment. It convinces them that their buying habits are sustainable and that because of that they can buy more and more and more. Interesting take.

Planning for the summer

So I’ve posted quite a bit recently about my plans for the summer and how they relate to web design and college news organizations. Here’s my plans for the summer in rough list of priority:

  • Work with the guys and gals at CoPress to get the Summer Web Design sessions up and running: This is something that I’m really excited about and I think it could lead to some really cool opportunities for those who get involved.
  • Create a new online identity for the Whitman Pioneer: Rework many of the aspects of our present website so that it can take advantage of what the web has to offer. A renewed focus on photography, advertising, and design elements will be my top priorities.
  • Continue to develop News Evolved and write more WordPress themes: News Evolved is far from being done in my eyes. While it’s nearly ready to deploy on a site if someone knows what they’re doing there’s a lot left to do to make it better in my eyes. Much of this requires me learning some php, so we’ll see how far along this gets. I’ve also got some ideas floating around for some more radical designs for news that I’m hoping to code in the coming months.

Those are my plans. We’ll see how far along they all get, but hopefully they’ll all be completed in just a little under 3 months.

Bookmarks for May 4th through May 5th

In order to share what I’ve found to be useful/interesting/etc. while browsing around below are my links for May 4th through May 5th. You can find my full set of bookmarks at my Delicious account.

Bookmarks for May 3rd through May 4th

In order to share what I’ve found to be useful/interesting/etc. while browsing around below are my links for May 3rd through May 4th. You can find my full set of bookmarks at my Delicious account.

Bookmarks for May 2nd through May 3rd

In order to share what I’ve found to be useful/interesting/etc. while browsing around below are my links for May 2nd through May 3rd. You can find my full set of bookmarks at my Delicious account.

  • Let Them Eat Tweets – Why Twitter Is a Trap – While it's at least a slightly less biased and antagonistic look at Twitter than Dowd's recent piece it still is just plain odd. To say that Twitter and connections are essentially signs of poverty is to disrespect all those who aren't lazy and isolated millionaires. Just because someone living in the Hamptons doesn't need to worry about the state of affairs and information doesn't mean that they shouldn't. To me this is more a statement upon the wealthy and upon people like Heffernan than anything else.
  • Live blog with Twitter plugin for WordPress — NevilleHobson.com – An interesting WordPress plugin that automatically pull tweets for a live blogging event into a WordPress post. Not quite sure what it offers that CoverItLive does not, but at least it's another alternative.
  • Web-kreation – Implement a Nice & Clean jQuery Sliding Panel in WordPress 2.7+ – A nice tutorial for creating a sliding menu for user login features as well as other aspects of a WordPress site. Could be used for navigation like on News Evolved but perhaps that's not the best option.
  • White House On MySpace, Facebook, Twitter – The Atlantic – I think that this article fails to take into account a major aspect though: these tools will only be successful if Obama and the White House use them to communicate *with* the community, not at it. It's got to be about more than just pushing our news updates. It needs to be about interaction.