When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.
Paul Graham in Taste for Makers, a beautifully written piece.
Month: March 2011
North Korea’s Digital Underground. What journalism looks like in North Korea. Fascinating read about how information slips and moves through the margins.
Bring me stuff that’s dead, please. Only when things are “dead” can the real work begin. Work that matters happens outside of view from the drive-by technorati.
Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors. A knowledge smack down about why we should not be alarmed over the damage to Japan’s nuclear reactors. Written by a research scientist at MIT.
Vienna
Had an absolute blast with the rest of the Happiness team during our week in Vienna. Got a lot of work done but had quite a bit of fun as well.
Jetpack
Jetpack is our latest creation at Automattic. It’s a plugin that brings the best of the WordPress.com experience to WordPress.org installations. It already includes some really slick features that are only going to get better.
I’ve been beta testing this for a few weeks and am super excited to see it going live. Go read more about it in the announcement post.
Anatomy of a Crushing. Maciej Ceglowski, founder of Pinboard, writes about what it was like after the leak of Delicious’ imminent death. Includes some jaw dropping graphs and loads of details.
Traffic lights are dancing. An argument for why consistent placement of interface elements is key to a cohesive operating system. (via Chris Bowler)
The distraction trope. Every new technology brings distraction, but only for a time. The distraction will pass and wonderful possibilities await if we believe that the person next to us is not merely distracted by the latest shiny toy.
Replacing CoveritLive with P2
Two days ago Demand Media acquired CoveritLive. This made some understandably bummed and concerned for the future of the tool.
We never used CoveritLive while I was at The Pioneer but I know it’s a favorite of college news organizations as well as larger media companies. It’s easy, fast to set up, and you can drop it into any existing template.
The problem is that CoveritLive is yet another corporate blogging silo. Even before it was a part of Demand Media using it still meant putting your live event coverage in a wrapper controlled by a third-party. Not the greatest idea for long-term data integrity.
I’ve never understood why more schools, organizations, and media companies don’t replace a corporate tool like CoveritLive with a open source tool. Something like a WordPress site combined with P2.
P2 is just as much, if not more, of a live blog than CoveritLive. It comes with keyboard shortcuts, real-time updates, username notifications, and more. And, because it’s a WordPress blog, each post and comment has a permalink. Score one for linking directly to a reference in the future.
Like CoveritLive, P2 allows you to easily moderate comments on a thread while also adding photos, videos, links, and audio. Your live blog can bring in content from wherever you want on the web.
If you wanted to embed comments and questions from a Twitter hashtag that’s incredibly easy as well. Just use a plugin like Blackbird Pie to embed tweets into your live stream with a simple shortcode.
If you are a student, teacher, or someone else who needs help setting up a live blog get in touch. I am happy to help show you what P2 can do and talk about why it’s good to have data on your terms.