June 2010
1 post
Local TV news: Waiting for the other shoe to drop
Remember recently how Alan Mutter warned that the business of local TV news — supported primarily by expensive advertising on its flagship news programs — was about to be newspapered? That is, to have its very business model rendered, eventually, moot?
Well, here are two more signs that the other shoe is dangling by the merest nanometer of fingernail for local TV news. The first...
May 2010
18 posts
Mutter to local TV: You're next
Alan Mutter has a message for local TV stations: What happened to newspapers is probably about to happen to you next.
Once it becomes as easy and satisfying to view a YouTube video on your 50-inch television as it is to watch “Two and a Half Men,” audiences will fragment to the point that local broadcasters will not be able to attract large quantities of viewers for a particular program at a...
"Don't tell anyone," but it's easy to search...
In theory, I’m okay with Facebook being more open to the world. But that assumes that the people using it realize they’re likely talking in public, not just among their friends. Thanks to openbook, you can now see how that’s working out, by searching Facebook statuses of lots of people - not just the people in your circle of friends. The site defaults to a random-rotation of...
In the time it takes to read this headline,...
It’s hard to say what’s more mind-blowing: That they stream two billion videos a day, or that we got here in just five years. Happy 5th Birthday to YouTube.
"We're from the artists' collective, and we're...
If I sneak into your yard and paint a picture on your wall, do you now own my painting? Or, as the artist, do I retain ownership of the painting and its context? What if I paint the picture on seemingly abandoned property? Does the bank now own it? The municipality? What if you like it so much that you decide to cut the art out of the wall — to protect it, of course — and move it to...
Felt wisdom
Why is it that the pundits making the most sense these days are either fake or puppets? RE: The stolen iPhone prototype, Mosspuppet says: “My question to you various idiots is: What the hell did you expect them to do? If someone steals your stuff, you call the cops. “Imagine for a moment that someone broke into your house and stole your television. Would you be guilty of manipulating...
Sam Phillips rewrites the music business model....
Sam Phillips is not just a singer-songwriter, she’s a mogul. Well, okay. A mini-mogul. And she’d probably bristle at even that. But through her year-long “Longplay” experiment in making music in semi-public for a paying audience, she’s set herself up as a fascinating amalgam of record company exec and free-wheeling artist. And what’s really neat about it,...
Do pay walls create new opportunities?
The New York Times, as expected, seems to have settled on a date for the paywall to go live: January, 2011. There’s no point in hashing out, again, whether or not this is a good idea for the New York Times and the many other major metro papers considering such a move. The one good thing about paywalls going live is that the theoretical questions will finally be answered in the real world....
Parkour: The Internet sensation of 2004
I’m reminded of what Jim Halpert said: “This is Parkour, the Internet sensation of 2004. The goal is to get from Point A to Point B as creatively as possible. So, technically, they are doing Parkour, as long as Point A is delusion and Point B is the hospital.”
Now that's targeted advertising
A great ad guy knows his target audience better than they know themselves. So, when copywriter Alec Brownstein went looking for a new gig, he bought Google ad keywords that were the names of prominent agency creative directors. Why? Because he knew Google-assisted narcissism would eventually come to his aid. Watch: Total cost to Brownstein: $6.00
What is iPad?
“It’s already a revolution. And it’s only just begun.” And it’s also shards of glass and aluminum if that’s how you insist on carrying it around. Great ad. Great product demo. Lousy example of how to protect your new precious. (Interesting side note I hadn’t noticed before: iPad, like Pink Floyd and Google, takes no definite article, at least according...
We're all hyper-retailers now
It feels like something big just happened with the launch of Square, the personal credit-card swiping system that’s integrated with iPhone and iPad. Suddenly, anybody can be a retailer that takes plastic. Sure, you could sell your stuff previously on eBay, Etsy or any number of online marketplaces using the insufferable PayPal, but when it came to the real world, unless you had a merchant...
The Angry Birds fans are angry, and empowered
It’s still surprising in this inter-connected age that a company can get caught thinking they can pull one over on people. And yet, they do. Case in point: The wildly-popular Angry Birds iPhone game just got upgraded to an iPad “HD” edition, and the price jumped 500%. Which, at a mere five dollars, would still be a bargain, if it weren’t for the fact that, as many have...
TMI, automated
Given that I’ve always treated my Facebook account as if it were 100% public, the ever-creeping publicness of Facebook hasn’t concerned me much. But if you think — or worse, act as if — Facebook is still the same private walled-garden you joined in 2006, you’d be well-advised to spend a few minutes with this excellent infographic from All Facebook which shows the...
Hello, future. You look awfully familiar.
Do concept cars look like they do because that’s the natural progression of design, or because some Sci-Fi artists in the 1950s decided this is what the car of the future will look like? Either way, if I have a spare $50k in 2015, I just might get one.
NYT on iPad: Almost as good as...paper?
At first, I tried to enjoy its simplicity, but the NYT “Editor’s Choice” app is starting to get really ridiculous. Witness this article that’s nothing more than a collection of links that — are you ready for it? — don’t link. (Failure highlighted in yellow for your reading pleasure.) The only explanation: the focus group was infiltrated by radical...
Is it easy for a new user to get lost on iPad?
Jakob Nielsen* and crew have churned out a quick usability study of the Apple iPad. And while it’s far, far too early (and the number of test subjects too small) to be making any hard and fast recommendations or rules (and Nielsen stipulates as much), the report reminded me of something that struck me this weekend watching a new iPad user (and non-iPhone user) try to acclimate herself to the...
1 tag
Middlebury College rewards inquiring minds
A colleague sent me a link to Middlebury College’s web site recently, and I was really impressed. It’s very simple - just a name, a search box, some navigation and a horizontally-scrolling series of colored bars: But hidden inside those colored bars is a candbox-like invitation to sample stories about the institution that’s kind of irresistible. The folks at Middlebury...
Is it time to retire our digital card catalogs?
I raised a ruckus recently on a higher-ed web design listserv by suggesting that it’s time to dump the A-Z index from our websites. You know. Those alphabetically organized Lists of “Things You May Be Looking For On Our Site”? Why do we still make them? Haven’t we come down the road a piece from 1997? Back then, manually building a comprehensive site index was part of...
January 2010
3 posts
Resolved
Much more posting here in 2010. But first to deal with this nagging cold.
November 2009
11 posts
1 tag
"Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection...
Elizabeth Gilbert at TED, talking about the fear that lingers behind the nagging need to write, the curious nature of genius and what happens when you keep showing up to do your job. Bonus points for using Tom Waits as a positive role model.
1 tag
NaNoWriMo: Back on the horse
After taking a few days off post-TEDx, I’m back on-course, at 13, 339 words. And today is not yet over (though the finale of Mad Men looms, with a giant time-sucking sound.)
2 tags
MICA's Brown Center was a great venue for TEDx...
I’ve driven past, or under it nearly a hundred times, but today was the first time I had the opportunity to spend time inside The Brown Center, the glass-curtained building with the thrusting overhang that opened on the MICA campus a few years back. All I can say is: Wow. Modern spaces can often be cold and odd and, while The Brown Center is certainly quirky, it fits in nicely on...
3 tags
Tom Stoppard on writing, via Scott Simon at...
It had been years since I’d thought of this beautiful passage about writing until I heard Scott Simon quote it this morning at TEDx MidAtlantic. It comes from the amazing play The Real Thing, by Tom Stoppard: “Words… They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across...
1 tag
NaNoWriMo inspiration: Laura Lippman
Maybe it’s because we used to work for the same newspaper. Or maybe it’s because she nails the details of Baltimore in her books. Or maybe it’s because the woman can write the hell out of a book and leave you wondering how she does it. Whatever, I’m a fanboy, a homer. So here’s summa Baltimore’s pride and joy, Laura Lippman.
1 tag
"He's a writer looking for inspiration..."
Who remembers this great movie about finding the writer’s muse?
It's a Mad Men world
Here’s a not-quite-so-random thought following last night’s penultimate episode of Season 3 of Mad Men: What if the next episode jumps as far forward in the timeline as is normally reserved for a new season? Why? Last night’s episode was both a hard ending (Don, crushed and defeated) and a beginning (The real 1960s that got underway following the death of a president). But the...
1 tag
NaNoWriMo: Read this now
Merlin Mann on “The Top … Habits of Amazing Writers.”
1 tag
In which Mr. Nabokov dissembles while moving to...
Somehow I’ve gotten this far in life without hearing Vladimir Nabokov’s voice or seeing him move. Oddly cartoonlike for such a wickedly good writer. I love how he’s clearly enjoying the hell out of himself here.
1 tag
NaNoWriMo Progress, Day One
I’m almost at exactly the daily count that I need to hit if I’m going to be on track for NaNoWriMo, but I’m only about 1/3 of the way toward my Day One goal of 5,000 words. I figure that’ll be far enough in to tell whether this idea has some momentum and, if so, to give me a little buffer should things slow down as I’m told they do in week two. UPDATE: Finished at...
2 tags
"It's all in your head, and you take your head...
Nick Hornby, on writing. Thanks, PBS, for the non-embeddable clip. Skip to 5:30 to get the the good bits.
October 2009
1 post
1 tag
On writing: The guy who wrote the book
Crummy video quality, but worthwhile to hear Stephen King talk about how a story idea can just kind of appear directly in front of you.
September 2009
3 posts
Why I've been M.I.A.
This site has been quiet as I burned the midnight oil, along with new colleague Kiel McLaughlin to launch the new Johns Hopkins University web site. I think it looks pretty good, but then, I’m biased. Six weeks from start to finish, so there are still (many) rough edges to polish, but we wanted to get this live in time for the Inauguration of our new university president this past weekend.
1 tag
WordPress blowed up real good
I think I now understand how Windows partisans feel when people like me get all smug about how viruses just seem to like that particular operating system. Because I’m in a similar sitch at the moment with WordPress. As you may have heard, all hell broke loose this weekend as a worm had its way with WordPress installations that were neither updated to the latest version nor hardened. All...
Is wonderful to have your web!
Apologies to the few legitimate commenters, but I had to turn on moderation. It seems this site has picked up a few new friends who really, really want to introduce you to the inexpensive pharmaceutical products they have to offer. For some reason, Akismet is not working here in the same way it works beautifully on other WP sites I manage. Must investigate when I have the time. Until then,...
August 2009
10 posts
There is no mobile web
Steve Yelvington has seven points you should consider about what we’ve been calling the “mobile web,” the most interesting one of which is the first: There is no Mobile Web. There is only one Web, and it is the real Web. All the pseudo-Webs and WAP-services and walled-garden fakery are dead. Good stuff. It’s all here.
It's our most fuel-efficient vehicle yet!
Car retailer Jack Antwerpen shows us he’s the biggest dealer in town in today’s full-page cover to the Autos section of The Baltimore Sun. But, as Norma Desmond might have said, it’s not that the dealers have gotten bigger; it’s that the cars have gotten smaller. So much smaller. Yes, this shall be submitted to Photoshop Disasters.
Apple in my eye
I see these a lot while driving around: Now, maybe it’s because I drive a Honda Element with an Apple sticker on the back that I notice everyone else that goes by me in a Honda Element with an Apple sticker, but I think that somewhere at Apple or Honda there’s a Venn Diagram on the wall showing a high overlap of Element and Apple customers. Because Element drivers sure seem to...
3 tags
Brit makes Baltimore reporters look like gits
Healthy skepticism — in blogging and in Big Iron reporting for a metro daily — is a necessary tool to have at all times. Take yesterday’s YouTube embed, allegedly from Baltimore’s tourism office, suggesting that Baltimore, the city, is safer than you’d think from watching The Wire on television. My initial reaction was shock at the thought that someone in Visit...
Having my say about "Say Everything"
Say Everything is about people. But first, the news. — The destruction of two buildings in lower Manhattan marked the end of a lot of things — mainly our assumptions about how the world worked — and the beginning of a lot more. It also marked the moment when both traditional online news and the then-nascent field of blogging came of age. If they didn’t know it on...
1 tag
Baltimore: Not quite as lethal as you think
This is a joke, right? Because, if not, the blowback and the apologies will certainly be entertaining to watch. Update: It’s definitely not the work of Visit Baltimore, the city’s tourism board, despite what the snookered City Paper says.
1 tag
Kaboom!
Hah! It figures that the moment I decide to start writing about WordPress, my fancy-schmancy custom theme decides that it’s going to explode on the single posts. There’s work to be done… EDIT TO ADD: Looks like I’ve reverted to the stock theme. Marina hated that picture of me anyway. So enjoy the stock imagery for a few days until I have an hour to throw at fixing the...
1 tag
WordPress: It's a great CMS
So, WordPress. Depending on the day, it’s the smile on my face or the knot on my brow. It’s probably the simplest thing I’ve ever monkeyed with behind the curtain and, yet, it’s insanely complex. According to those who know, it’s a lousy content management system. And yet, I have to disagree. It’s got some limitations, to be sure, but I’ve found it to be...
After newspapers, what?
Because it had been so long since I’d posted, the previous “Why I need a vacation from newspaper blogging” was really more of a “Why I started my vacation from newspaper blogging months ago but neglected to mention before this” post. So, what now? I want to write more about what I’ve been immersed in for most of this year: higher ed digital communications. Or,...
1 tag
The last newspaper post for a while
Not only have I not written about newspapers for a while, I’ve also not finished a longish piece I’ve been working on about not writing about newspapers anymore. But it really boils down to this: I’m out. I can’t stand to be the guy screaming from the stands that the team is running toward the wrong end zone. If newspapers want to march off the cliff of paid content, they...
June 2009
1 post
Livetweeting "The End of Local News?"
A reposting, in actual chronological order (not normal reverse), of the Tweets from the recent symposium in Baltimore on the future of local news after newspapers. missjames: waiting for the merrill panel on local news to start. #localnews nancethepants : This is the largest group of journalists I’ve ever seen converge without breaking news or booze. #localnews pinkgrammar : With @...
April 2009
1 post
3 tags
Recent posts at Nieman Journalism Lab
As I’ve been doing all my journalism-related posting at Nieman Journalism Lab, and my higher-ed posting hasn’t yet ramped up here, my blog has gotten cobwebby in the past month. So, this list of what I’ve been up to lately. I’d be honored if you follow any or all of the links below. You can also find all my posts aggregated on one page at Nieman Lab as well. More here...
March 2009
5 posts
2 tags
How Apple media swarms the news
On the Nieman Journalism Lab today, I point to the semi-yearly ritual of Apple-focused media covering today’s iPhone 3.0 announcements as a great example of distributed reporting, well-suited to a web and mobile delivery model. For more, and links to all the iPhone 3.0 action, please join me at The Lab.