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Monday, November 6, 2006
Looking better all the time 
| | I continue to be amazed at how much great photography is out there. |
Your trip to hell is important to us
| | A couple days ago I got a call from a recording that did nothing but tell me how corrupt Cruz Bustamante (our Lieutenant Governor and a classmate of my cousins when they were all growing up in Dinuba) is. Today my sister got a phone message from a recording of Rush Limbaugh (What do you think when you hear the word 'liberal'? That you've beat it to death, Rush.) Earlier she got more calls than she could count from a pile of Republicans running for office in her North Carolina district. |
| | We're both on the do-not-call list. Talk about violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. |
| | Just one more way the current crop of GOPhers is digging holes to hell for themselves. |
Adding one and two
Evolution vs. Devolution
| | By the way, I don't come away from Dawkins' challenges to religion with any less faith. But then, what faith I have doesn't come from the likes of Ted Haggard. |
News-Press vs. News-Press
| | "We've already had some really amazing results with the crowdsourcing element of this," said Jennifer Carroll, Gannett's VP for new media content. "Most of us got into this business because we were passionate about watchdog journalism and public service, and we've just watched those erode. We've learned that no one wants to read a 400-column-inch investigative feature online. But when you make them a part of the process they get incredibly engaged." |
| | The most prominent example, Carroll said, occurred this summer with The News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida. In May, readers from the nearby community of Cape Coral began calling the paper, complaining about the high prices -- as much as $28,000 in some cases -- being charged to connect newly constructed homes to water and sewer lines. |
| | Maness asked the News-Press to employ a new method of looking into the complaints. "Rather than start a long investigation and come out months later in the paper with our findings we asked our readers to help us find out why the cost was so exorbitant," said Kate Marymont, the News-Press' editor in chief. |
| | The response overwhelmed the paper, which has a circulation of about 100,000. "We weren't prepared for the volume, and we had to throw a lot more firepower just to handle the phone calls and e-mails," Marymont said. |
| | A hyphen is all that separates the URL of the Ft. Myers News-Press from the Santa Barbara News-Press. So does a world of cluefulness. |
| | While the Ft. Myers News-Press eagerly discovers the benefits of collaborating with readers online, the Santa Barbara News-Press runs one of the most Web- and reader-hostile websites in the whole country. The difference shows up in nothing more simple than the two papers' archived editorial. The Ft. Myers paper exposes theirs. (Here's one sample from 2004.) The Santa Barbara paper locks even their daily editorial behind a paywall. (Not to mention making it real hard even for daily print subscribers — yours truly, for example — to get into the thing.) |
| | Now look up Santa Barbara News-Press. You get 420,000 results, many of which are negative. (These used to be on the first page of results, but Google is aging them down the results pages now that the paper's meltdown is becoming stale news.) |
| | Here's the difference. Santa Barbara's main paper contributes to .0067% of the results (many of them negative) when people look up Santa Barbara, while Ft. Myers' main paper contributes to 16.2% of the results when people look up Ft. Myers. |
| | Wendy, are you listening? |
USMob Today
| | Would also be interesting to see if their stock goes up. |
See you (not) there
| | Second, to Macworld and CES: why did you go and schedule both events at exactly the same time? Sorry Macworld: you lose. Unfortunately, so the the friends I see there every year, which had become the main reason I went. Or used to go. |
Saving thousands of pixels
Citizourcing
| | Who knows if the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 could have been averted? But one thing is clear in the documentation and reporting that has come out in the past five years: Intelligence agencies then were not talking to each other enough, owing to divisional rivalries, lack of trust and the bunkering of intel operations in their own "silos." |
| | Now the intelligence agencies are trying to remedy those problems with something they call Intellipedia, a model based on the popular online, user-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia. |
| | Redraw your own conclusions. |
Vroom for improvement
| |  Does anybody pay closer attention to their art than Steve Gillmor does? I made the decision early to lay out as much as possible and see what the underlying dynamics of a Gillmor-less Gang felt like. Which he did, and he explains at some length. Great reading for those who want to see how one of podcasting's most independent producers continues birthing this new genre. By the way, Steve is re-uploading some parts of the latest Gillmor Gang ("Harpo Gang", subject of the post linked above. I thought it was one of our best, mostly because I called in on a phone that didn't make me sound like I was in in another room. |
Widgets from hail
| | Back in the earliest Seventies, WBAI in New York ran a radio play set on a surreal planet where everybody spoke in gambling language. "I'll lay five on the chance that Jane isn't coming through with the Fleebus deal." "Let's short this. We're not getting anywhere." Stuff like that. I don't remember the dialog, just how it showed how it's possible to get totally caught up in one way of thinking and talking about things. |
| | In some ways Cluetrain was a rant against the way too many of us thought and talked about the Internet at the height of the dot-com madness — all that stuff about portals and malls and stickiness and eyeballs. A lot of that thinking, that language, was driven by a tsunami of venture money. |
| | Some of that thinking went away after the crash. But some didn't. And that thinking is still driven by venture money. |
| | Two of the biggest still-defaulted venture notions are that 1) you need "a lock-in" for your customers and 2) everything you make or do needs a "revenue model". |
| | I wonder about the widget revenue model. People might feel differently about posting a widget if it came with advertising, unless they had some input about which ads were featured. |
| | I think they would. After all, aren't widgets themselves promotional? If I have a widget from Flickr or Tabblo or Weatherbug or Google, isn't the "branded" provenance of the widget a form of promotion? |
| | Of course, there are plenty of other widgets that don't brand themselves. (At least not aggressively.) I am sure, however, that I would be less likely to put one on my blog if I knew it carried advertising. |
| | But my point isn't about that. It's about the need for everything on Earth (even widgets) to have a "revenue model". I mean, what's the revenue model for your spouse? For your house? For your mom, your driveway, your pants or your garage door opener? |
| | Some things are just things. Looking at them through a balance sheet is just silly. |
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