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Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Wholes in hearts 
| | Many years ago my friend S— said the death of his nine-year-old son "leaves a hole in my heart that will never close". The boy had been killed accidentally by another boy when the two boys found a loaded handgun that the other boy's father kept for "protection". None of the survivors will ever get over that. I'll always remember the dead son as a happy boy in a baseball cap. In his coffin he wore that cap to cover the hole in his head. |
| | A few minutes ago I learned that the son of a friend of ours had committed suicide. It's not that I can't begin to imagine what pain this must cause. It's that I can't help imagining it and don't want to go there. But I have to. We all do, if we wish to console the inconsolable. |
| | I also learned today that Sylvia's mom died last week. My heart goes to her as well. It will be four years in August since my mom died, and this is the first year that I remember her 90th birthday better than her funeral. It was a perfect North Carolina April day. So was the day, 28 years before this past Easter Sunday, when I learned that my father had died. I can still hear both Mom's and Pop's voices as vividly as if they were here. Their absences still leave holes in my heart. You can't fill those holes. The only good thing you can do is let love flow back out of them. |
| | The older I get, the more I see life as the exception rather than the rule. Those gone outnumber those here, all of whom will live one speck of time in an unimaginable abundance of it — on a sphere so small and remote from others like it that nothing in our bodily experience gives us a scale to measure the exceptional grace of mere existence. |
| | Regardless of one's religion, mortality is an indisuptable fact of the only life we know. Even if you are reincarnated, what will you know in your next life of the life you have now? About as much as you remember from your last one, is what. At their worst, Alzheimers patients remember more than that. |
| | Life is a gift we give away. The best we can do is give it well. |
| | ... what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was alll the saints I had met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society. |
| | Joe, a young man from Pittsburgh, came up to me with one request: "Please tell me it will be okay." |
| | "Welcome to Earth, young man," I said. "It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, Joe, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule I know of: Goddamn it, Joe, you've got to be kind!" |
| | That's the same Kurt Vonnegut who by grace of (God, luck, fate, whatever), survived the carpet-bombing of Dresden as an American soldier serving as a German prisoner of war and lived to tell about it. While the city burned above their heads, he and six other prisoners were held in an underground meat locker at a place called Slaughterhouse 5. After the fire, the survivors emerged to behold about the worst devastation ever visited on a city — and then slaved as a retrievesr of corpses, most of which had been reduced by fire to the look and feel of charcoal logs. That Vonnegut can speak of kindness is itself a proof of its transcendance. |
| | We can help or we can hurt. That's the choice life gives us. |
The bleat goes on
| | Ever since posting this and this (both prompted by this), I've been having offline conversations with folks on the inside of the newspaper business. One surprise is learning that a good thing — the church/state separation of editorial and business sides of newspapers — has in some cases distanced writers from What's Happening with newspapers on the Web. In other words, lots of writers are clueless about Web-related business realities and decsions — while lots of newspaper business folks are clueless about Web Facts that writers are in a better position to find out. (We went through exactly this realization at Linux Journal several years ago when a business decision was made to put editorial archives behind a paywall. We quickly reversed that decision after it was clear from editorial folks that this not only removed the magazine form search engine indexes but severely reduced our ability to recruit good writers. Always make new mistakes, Esthr says. We learned a good lesson there.) |
| | Then there's what Jeff Jarvis surfaces through related observations in a Guardian column. He opens by saying the World Association of Newspapers portrays Google an enemy. (No link, unfortunately... maybe I'll find one later.) Jeff only conditionally disagrees: I¹d call Google something between a necessary evil and a friend - and if news organisations are smart, they will learn how to befriend the beast. |
| | Already we're in severe conflation-ville here. To see how, consider the two or three different Googles that newspapers are dealing with. One is the main search engine, which indexes everything that can be found on the Web. The second is Google News, which provides short-cuts to stories that are also out there on the Web but only from a few thousand news sources. The third is Google Blogsearch, a Technorati-like engine that only searches sources of syndicated editorial — stuff that's too new for the big main search engine. Think of the first as Static Web search, and the other two as Live Web search. |
| | There are differences in the overlaps here, but they do roughly correspond to the archival and current news editorial separations in the papers' content oeuvres: news=Live and archives=Static. |
| | That division is roughly between what I call "the news" and "the olds". The irony here is that papers charge for the news and give away the olds in print (the olds being fishwrap and recycling fodder), while they do exactly the opposite online. So they compete with themselves in both areas. Specifically, by giving away daily editorial online, they undermine street and subscription sales; and by charging for archival editorial, they remove their goods from the vast reference library that Google and other search engines have become. What papers that do this are saying, essentially, is that the news has sales value in itself (instead serving as free bait for advertising — a model borrowed from commercial broadcasting and all those free papers piled up outside coffee shops and restaurants), while the olds is worth $2.50 per story. |
| | I've also been told that Google for many years has for years been failing to sell papers on the idea of reducing this irony by using AdSense as an alternate (and perhaps much more remunerative) way to monetize the olds. Why? Papers regard their archives as "crown jewels". |
| | Making this all even more complicated are deals between search engines, various papers and news agencies like AFP and AP for condiitonal usages that are poorly uderstood by prety much everybody other than those making the deals. (Perhaps I'm overstating this, because I've heard about several of these deals, and I still don't understand them. If I have time today I may plug some links into this paragraph.) |
| | Back to Jeff, who (surprisingly to me) inveighs on behalf of (gulp) SEO: |
| | ...to cut yourself off from search and links is like taking your paper off the newsstand and making people go out of their way to find it. What sane publisher would do that? |
| | Sane publishers are, instead, engaging in the black art of the age: "search-engine optimisation"(SEO), which means making your content easily findable via Google and company. I am a believer. Full disclosures: I work with the New York Times Company¹s About.com, which has become a top-10 site via SEO. It is a wonder. I am also working with a startup that, not unlike Google, organises news, because I believe this will help bring readers to relevant reporting. And I advise newspapers that all their content - including their archives - should be online, for every search engine, aggregator and blog to find. |
| | SEO means changing even the content on pages so it can be read not just by humans but by machines. For example, if you¹re a newspaper with witty headlines people appreciate, you also should consider writing patently obvious headlines that say exactly what stories are about so a computer robot can find and understand them and guide people there to appreciate those witty headlines. And maybe telling people what a story is about at a glance isn¹t a bad idea, either. |
| | But don¹t stop there. You also want your content to be part of the conversation. Once they find that content, you want people to talk about it so more can find it. And that means you need to be comfortable with seeing your content quoted, excerpted and remixed. I am honoured when people quote my blog - even if to disagree with me - because it means I said something worth repeating. Shouldn¹t every newspaper think likewise? To be quoted is to be linked and to be linked is to be read. That is life online. |
| | My worst fear in all this is not for Google, but for the news publishers who are launching this campaign. If they succeed in hiding their content from the public they are supposed to serve, then I fear for their businesses, for the newspaper industry, and for journalism itself. For if the newspapers don¹t show up in GoogleNews, who will be left there but us bloggers? |
| | All due self-respect, that would be a Bad Thing. |
The longer picture
| | The Internet provides people with a new way to tell their story. When the grandkids aren¹t interested in listening anymore, older people can still share their stories and get feedback. The technology makes it simple. |
| | It¹s a trope that the Internet is a young person¹s medium... That is just not true. |
| | It's a good piece. Read it and follow the links. |
Good ideas
| | This is the post where I was listing a pile of good ideas I ran across today. But I screwed something up and lost all of the ones I accumulated by 8:40 in the morning, which is now. Not sure what that figures, but it does. |
Welcome
| | Kathy Sierra is back, treating us to a fun reprise of her excellent visuals, and asking for help about what to do next. She has 174 comments so far. |
| | A surprising number of them suggest taking her blog private and making it "paid content", which I think would be a big mistake. Many more urge her to press on and keep blogging. I agree with those folks. Paul Ritchie has the simplest and best bottom line: |
| | Keep blogging. Moderate comments. You win. |
| | Of course, that's just my advice. The best post-Easter message on the matter comes from Monty Python in Life of Brian. Big hat tip to Brad DeLong for reminding us about that one. |
| | Another of my faves comes, as usual, from Hugh (there on the right)  In due respect to that brand, Kathy has also moved the original "threats" post to a different page (though retaining the permalink with a pointer to that page). This smartly decontaminates her blog while respecting the need for available source materials — so those interested can learn from the experience. (If she were a typical newspaper she'd put it behind a paywall, but perhaps she'll serve as a good example to those papers by not doing that. Better scholarship through freebeerdom, I say.) |
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