Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

Link Journalism

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Something that’s been fascinating me over the past few weeks during all the weather weirdness has been how incredibly valuable Twitter has been in keeping track of everything that’s happening. The #seatst (Seattle Twitter! Storm! Team!) and #pdxtst (Portland Twitter! Storm! Team!) tags were the single best sources for moment-by-moment information during the snowstorms, #waflood is still running strong for tracking flood info, and last night I was reading about an #earthquake in California just minutes after it happened. I’ve been enjoying Twitter for day-to-day trivialities and quick bursts of drivel that wouldn’t be worth making a full formal post for, but it’s Twitter’s growing usefulness as a crowdsourced quick-response news channel is mindblowing.

Of course, I’m far from the only person noticing this trend, and there’s a neat article at Publishing 2.0 (which I found via a #waflood tagged tweet from Evan Calkins this morning) looking into the creation, evolution, and use of the #waflood tag over the past few days.

The discussion about journalism’s future so often focuses on Big Changes — Kill the print edition! Flips for everyone! Reinvent business models NOW! — that it’s easy to forget how simple innovation can be.

Sometimes all you need is a few Tweets, a bunch of links, and some like-minded pioneers.

That’s how a quiet revolution began in Washington state Wednesday. Four journalists spontaneously launched one of the first experiments in collaborative (or networked) link journalism to cover a major local story.

But it gets better. Those four journalists weren’t in the same newsroom. In fact, they all work for different media companies. And here’s the best part: Some of them have never even met in person.

It’s a great look at how the collaboration allowed the journalists and their respective news organizations to stay on top of the stories, and put together stories and information pages that were far more comprehensive than if they’d each stuck to their own individual “old media style” resources.

The Washington link projects should serve as models for the entire news industry. They show that collaborative linking draws readers, is easy, and costs nothing more than time (and not even much of that).

Seth said the December snowstorm link roundup was on the homepage for three or four days — but it was the site’s most-trafficked story for the entire month.

[…]

This is the power of collaborative news networks. By forming a network, newsrooms can discover not just a greater volume of news, but a greater volume of relevant, high-quality news than one person, one newsroom, or one wire service could alone.

Compare the Washington group’s great waflood link roundup to a Google News search for “Washington flood” — I know which one I’d rather have as a resource if I lived in that area.

Neat stuff. Even though I’m “just” a consumer, not a journalist in any sense, and not involved with or affiliated with any of these organizations, I’m fascinated by the effects of the evolving connections that technology is making possible between the media and the public, and within and among the various media organizations themselves.

Minor Weblog Redesign

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A new year is (almost) here, and along with that, it was time for a bit of a refresh to the design. It’s not a huge change — generally speaking, all the bits are in the same basic places — just a little fine-tuned and tweaked.

  • I’ve switched the theme to a mostly-stock installation of Carrington, with just a few tweaks here and there to suit my tastes.
  • Tweets are now a little more visually separated from each other and from longer posts, and are now linked back to the original entry on Twitter.
  • I’ve been adding tags to my entries for a little while, but they’re just now starting to be exposed via the new sidebar. Most entries don’t have tags, but I’m slowly adding them as I go back to work with older posts…that’s going to be a long, slow process that I’m not devoting a whole lot of time to. New posts will be tagged as they appear.
  • Google Adsense banners have been tweaked so that they’ll now appear underneath the first two non-Tweet posts on the main page. I’ve been trying to have some variation on that for a while (keeps them visible, but not super intrusive), but it’s been buggy. I think I’ve finally got it working properly.

And that about covers it.

This Weblog is ESTP

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According to Typealyzer, which analyzes the content of a weblog and places it within the Myers-Briggs personality matrix, this weblog classifies as ESTP (Extroverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving), “The Doers.”

The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

For the record, the last time I took an online version of the MBTI, I tested as ISFP (Introverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving). The Star Trek version of the MBTI also pegged me as ISFP, which apparently correlates with DS9’s Bareil or VOY’s Doctor.

(via Metafilter)

Breadcrummy

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I’m all for giving attribution for the goodies people find on the ‘net, letting readers know where the information comes from, acknowledging that links to cool stuff don’t just spontaneously appear, but are usually passed on from person to person and website to website.

Unfortunately, sometimes the process of tracing those breadcrumbs back when you actually want to get a little more information is an exercise in frustration.

For instance:

  1. Boing Boing posts about a silly little photography gadget that they saw over at…

  2. LikeCool, who have a tiny little “via” link (that I almost missed as it was buried under a stack of Google ads) that links to…

  3. Gizmodo, who finally link back to…

  4. Photojojo, who actually sell the silly thing, and have things like tech specs, adapter info, and so on.

In LikeCool’s defense, they did link directly to Photojojo’s page in the text of their post, but I missed that link on my first readthrough (the forest green link text wasn’t enough of a contrast difference to the black body text to catch my eye on the first skim).

Would it be too much trouble to say “I read about this here, and you can buy it or get more info here,” instead of forcing your readers to jump through multiple hoops? By the time I found my way to the source page, I’d pretty much lost interest in it. Besides, it looks more creepy than amusing or useful.

To Blu or Not To Blu?

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For Christmas this year, Prairie and I have decided to treat ourselves and upgrade our TV set from the one I bought when I moved to Seattle seven and a half years ago (!!!!!). It’s a nice enough TV (a Sony Wega 27-inch), but it’s huge, heavy, and while still in good shape, it’s old tech. The original plan was to wait until it died, but between Sony’s generally good longevity (my parents had a little Sony 13″ TV that went for almost thirty years) and my geeky techno-lust, Prairie surprised me by suggesting that we go ahead and upgrade to the new hotness.

So, the hunt is in progress. At this point, I’m pretty much decided on a 32″ Samsung, most likely either the LN32A550 or the LN32A650, depending on where prices land in the weeks between Black Friday and Christmas.

Of course, with the jump to an HDTV comes the jump to HD programming. Day-to-day entertainment will come courtesy of Comcast — we’re already getting our cable through them, so we’ll just upgrade that to the minimum possible digital/HD package. For movies, though, we’re doing a bit of back-and-forth (though, to be honest, Prairie’s on the “back” — that is, staying with what we have — while I’m on the “forth” side of the discussion).

My movie-loving, technology-geeking little heart tends to go all a-pitter-pat at upgrading to Blu-Ray. I jumped onto the DVD bandwagon as soon as it dropped into the realm of affordability, loved the jump in video and audio quality from my old VHS tapes, and have been looking forward to the next step forward.

Prairie, however, doesn’t really see what all the fuss is about, and her approach is one that I’m having an amusingly tough time arguing against: if we can see the show and enjoy the story, than what’s the big deal? She never saw a big difference between VHS and DVD, doesn’t really care about surround sound (a moot point at the moment, as living in an apartment building means that standard stereo at reasonable levels is far more realistic than full surround and gut-thumping subwoofers — something we really wish our neighbors would realize…), and just doesn’t see the point in adding another piece of electronics and another remote to the stack we have to keep track of already.

I’ve gotta admit, it’s hard to really say, “But…it’s better!” without realizing just how foolish that sounds.

Not that I don’t try. I’d have my geek card revoked if I didn’t at least try.

(And on a not-unrelated-at-all side note, I think it works wonderfully that our respective geek levels generally balance out into reasonable end results. I don’t know how couples made of dual übergeeks can manage!)

In any case, I think part of the conversation is simply the fact that we don’t really know how much of a change we’re going to see when we upgrade. Sure, I’ve looked at all the numbers and can see the mathmatical difference between SD 640×480 and FullHD 1920×1080, I’ve done simple little experiments looking at resolution increases, and I’ve been working with digital photography long enough that I can get a feel for the difference betweeen a .3 megapixel image and a 2 megapixel image (the approximate difference between SD and FullHD). But running numbers and reading webpages is no substitute for actually seeing what happens when we plug it all together.

So I tried a little experiment today, and tossed out two questions on Twitter…

You who’ve moved from “old school” TV to a new HDTV (pref. w/some form of HD feed): is it really that big of a difference? Turned up to 11?

Same question, part 2: Along the same lines, how about the DVD to Blu-Ray transition? Again, is it that much visibly better?

…and got the following responses:

  • axsdeny: DVD to Blu-Ray: yes. If you have even a 720p TV you can tell the difference. It’s beautiful.
  • lyracole: i don’t notice the difference between my standard and hd, but sir does. also, fuck blu-ray.
  • stoppableforce: w/r/t the difference between SDTV and HDTV: YES. YES. DEAR GOD YES. The difference in clarity is A-FUCKIN’-MAZING.
  • stoppableforce: w/r/t the DVD-to-Blu-Ray thing: Not so much. We’ve got both, Blu-Ray looks slightly better, not enough to make me buy a PS3 yet.
  • mellzah: I hate to admit it, but blu-ray looks great. DVDs don’t look sharp on my TV– non-HD projection 50ish inch–but Blu-Ray movies do!
  • skyler: Huge difference. I attribute most of it to HDMI, actually. Clearer interference free signal. Xbox 360 + 1080p is great w/DVDs.
  • antifuse: short answer? Yes. Longer answer? Depends what you watch. Plain DVDs upscaled by Blu ray look fab, and many shows look great too.
  • wnalyd: Finally answering your HDTV question: Heck yeah there’s a difference bwtn HD + SD. Turned up to 17. Wouldn’t go back.

So the final consensus (admittedly, since I used Twitter, drawing from a very weighted sample of at least somewhat geeky-type people), while not clear-cut across the board, seems to be that yes, there is a difference, ranging from “better” to “A-FUCKIN’-MAZING”. We’ll just have to wait and see where we fall along that spectrum with the equipment we have (we’ll have the HDTV and HD cable from Comcast for the pretty pretty pixels, and a non-upconverting DVD/VHS combo deck for movies), and maybe see if I can find anyone with a Blu-Ray player for us to borrow for a night to help us decide if we want to add that piece, too (of course, if the Blu-Ray players don’t drop into affordability, that’ll make the whole point moot as well).

Did I miss anything?

Over-Distributed Identity

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I need a comment aggregator.

Between the number of people I “know” (in the modern, electronic, netspace version of the word) who have accounts scattered among various online services and my ongoing attempt to own myself by claiming my name (either given or the online pseudonym of ‘djwudi’) across the ‘net, I’ve ended up with accounts on a multitude of websites. In order to try to ensure that all of those various people have a fair chance of keeping up with whatever trivialities burble to the surface of my brain and escape out into the electronic aether, I use services like ping.fm, WordPress plugins, and RSS aggregation options to mirror my output across all of those websites.

The upside to this is that whether I’m posting a short tweet, a link to something neat, or actually writing a post to my blog, the content automagically appears in one form or another across the sites I belong to.

The downside is that I only have so much time to actually check into all those various sites. My weblog, Flickr and Twitter accounts get frequent attention, Facebook gets semi-regular attention, Friendfeed gets slightly more than occasional attention, and the rest tend to fall between the cracks, often not getting checked in with unless some automated message tells me that someone’s trying to get my attention, add me as a ‘friend,’ or some other sort of administrative fiddlybit. Then, when I do log into one or another of these sites, I often find a number of responses and comments that have been sitting ignored (unintentionally) since their appearance.

What I need, then, is some form of comment aggregator service that would track when a particular post (of any form) is made, monitor its status on each of the various services, then either collect any comments at a central location or even simply alert me when a comment is made.

While I doubt such a service could be effectively constructed, due to the number of competing services that would have to integrate in some form, part of me wonders if this could be added as some form of extention to the Ping.fm service: since I assume that ping.fm has to get some form of ‘ok’ response when it sends my content out to that service, if that ‘ok’ response could include a reference to the item ID on the target site, perhaps ping.fm could store links to those URIs along with the original item in the ‘Recent Posts’ tab. Some form of notification would be even better, so you didn’t have to go check the ‘Recent Posts’ tab to keep track.

I’m sure there’s a number of reasons why this wouldn’t work, but you get the idea.

How do other people handle their distributed conversations? Is there a magic button (other than the “off” button) that I haven’t stumbled across yet?

Jazzy Genius

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While there’s been some grousing about the accuracy of iTunes 8’s new Genius feature, I’m getting a kick out of playing with it. Sure, it’s not always spot-on (though Apple says that will change over time as their database grows and the matching AI improves), but that lends a certain entertainment value to the playlists it generates. When it works, though, it’s slick.

Here’s a playlist my iPod just put together (pulling only from songs that happened to be loaded at the time), seeding off of Tony Bennett’s take on “Steppin’ Out With My Baby”:

  1. Tony Bennett, “Steppin’ Out With My Baby”
  2. Frank Sinatra, “Nice ‘n’ Easy”
  3. Bobby Darin, “More”
  4. Johnny Mathis, “Chances Are”
  5. Dean Martin, “You Belong to Me”
  6. Fred Astaire, “The Way You Look Tonight”
  7. The Andrews Sisters, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”
  8. Marilyn Monroe, “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”
  9. Billie Holiday, “All of Me”
  10. Perry Como, “Magic Moments”
  11. Louis Armstrong, “West End Blues”
  12. Louis Jordan, “Let the Good Times Roll”
  13. Benny Goodman, “Swingtime in the Rockies”
  14. Frank Sinatra, “Witchcraft”
  15. The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “At Last”
  16. Bobby Darin, “Hello, Dolly!”
  17. Billie Holiday, “Spreadin’ Rhythm Around (Remix)”
  18. Tony Bennett, “(I Left My Heart In) San Francisco”
  19. Dean Martin, “That’s Amore”
  20. Louis Armstrong, “Ain’t Misbehavin'”
  21. Duke Ellington, “Take the A-Train”
  22. Judy Garland, “The Man That Got Away”
  23. The Andrews Sisters, “Rum and Coca-Cola”
  24. Billie Holiday, “God Bless the Child”
  25. Frank Sinatra, “You Make Me Feel So Young”

Not bad at all, I’d say.

(I also love that I just happened to have the songs on my iPod to build that kind of playlist. It’s semi-randomly loaded, so there’s often no real telling what might be on there at any given time. Hmmm…it may be about time to do another “here’s how I organize my music” post….)

iPhone/iPod Touch Application Recommendations

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Recommendations based purely on my own personal needs, wants, and desires. These are the applications I’ve installed on my iPod Touch that have managed to stick around for more than a few days of experimenting…

Applications:

Utilities

  • WeatherBug: More information than the standard Weather app. I’ve put this on the home screen and moved Weather to a later page.

  • WordPress: I’ve hardly used it, as I’m usually close enough to my main ‘puter to blog from here, but it could come in quite handy the next time I travel.

  • Kiwi: A nice simple Wikipedia interface.

  • Google Mobile App: A one-stop shop for Google’s major offerings. Mostly just a launcher into their iPhone-optimized websites, but handy for using only one spot on the iTouch screen.

  • Google Earth: A little slow, but lots of fun to play with. Nice use of the accelerometer for moving your view around also. Plus, it’s free and makes a good “wow!” tech demo. ;)

  • Amazon Mobile: Because I really, really need a way to make spending more money even easier!

Media/Entertainment

  • Remote: I’m not using it much right now, but it’s fun to play with. It does make it tempting to put an Airport Express in the living room to pipe iTunes into the stereo there, though….

  • Rowmote: Slick little companion piece/replacement for Remote that acts as a remote control over WiFi for a whole host of applications on the Mac. I’ve been using this to control the QuickTime player while Prairie and I watch TV episodes we’ve downloaded from Bittorrent, and it works great. Very handy!

  • Pocketpedia: “I wonder if there’s a way for me to easily catalog my DVD collection and sync it with my iPod?” I said one day. A few minutes later, I had Pocketpedia on my iPod and DVDpedia (which generates this list) and Bookpedia on my Mac. Perfect!

  • Now Playing (formerly Box Office): Movie listings at local theaters, reviews, even trailers, all in one slick little app.

  • Stanza: An e-book reader that ties directly into Feedbooks, allowing you to download tons of free texts. I read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine over the past week on lunch, Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and a number of others. There’s also a desktop client, but I don’t think I’ll use that nearly as often, this is more for easy entertainment when I’ve got a few minutes to kill.

  • Kindle for iPhone: I wouldn’t spend the money for an actual Kindle, but I’ve ended up spending enough time using Stanza for eBooks that I figured I’d give this a try as well. All I’ve picked up so far is the Stephen King short story ‘Ur’, and I haven’t even read it yet, but a few minutes of poking around leads me to believe that Kindle isn’t bad either.

Photography

Social Networking

  • Tweetie: I tried a few, and this is by far the best Twitter app I’ve found. Multiple accounts, saved searches, trend watching, and ping.fm integration. This is my #1 most-used 3rd party app.

  • Facebook: I don’t really use it that often, but often enough that it’s stuck around. I’ve been using Facebook more often recently, and along with that, the Facebook app. Pretty slick, actually.

  • Myspace Mobile: I still hate Myspace, but I have to admit, if their actual website worked half as well as their iPhone app, I might not hate them quite as much. Not bug-free, but so much more bug-free and pleasant to look at than the actual website that this is my preferred method of checking in on those friends who I can’t talk out of the MySpace ghetto.

  • LinkedIn: I don’t stop by here as much, but if I need to, I’ve got the app to do it.

News

  • Mobile News: AP’s news browser. When I just want a quick browse of major news stories, this is the way to do it. I especially like the localization options.

Games

  • Boom!: Minesweeper. ‘Nuff said.

  • Enigmo: I’m not entirely sold on this one. Neat and all, but the screen’s so small on the iPod/iTouch that I lose track of what objects have been placed where. I think I’d like this as a desktop game rather than in its mobile version.

  • Quordy: A great little word game. Prairie and I have both had a lot of fun with this one — since the default is to start a game by shaking the iPod as if you were shaking a Yahtzee dice cup, if we’ve got a few minutes to kill somewhere, Prairie will just say “Shake it! Shake it!” and (rather than breaking into a dance, which I’m sure would be amusing as well) out comes Quordy.

  • Aurora Feint: While I’m not putting a ton of time into the RPG aspect of the game, the Tetris-like game itself is fun enough to keep me engrossed.

  • Jirbo Break: I’ve always liked Breakout clones, and this one works fine for me. I’d made it through all the levels, but they just released an update giving it 99 total levels. Guess I better get back to work!

  • Cube Runner: Marvelously simple, engrossing, and a great demonstration of the accelerometer. Still one of my favorite games.

iPhone/iTouch Optimized Sites:

  • Ping.fm: The dashboard interface to the Ping.fm one-update-does-all website. Now that Tweetie ties into ping.fm directly, I’ve removed this.

  • Twitter: Since I use Ping.fm to update, I’m fine with using the Twitter mobile client to check updates. I do at times wish I could easily check @ replies, but not often enough to install Twitteriffic (which has just never quite felt “right” for me, in either its desktop or mobile incarnations) or another dedicated client. Tweetie to the rescue again!

  • NewsGator: Even though there’s a well-regarded NetNewsWire app for the iPhone/iTouch, I still just use the NewsGator mobile site. It’s faster and easier to use than NNW mobile, and while I keep poking at NNW mobile, it still hasn’t been able to win me over. I’ve actually been pulled away from the NewsGator family, and now use the Google Reader mobile interface.

  • CNN Moble: Not actually iPhone/iTouch optimized, and not terribly pretty, but works if I just want a quick look at “what’s happening now”.

  • Metafilter: Read-only as far as I can tell, but a slick way to browse MeFi.

  • IMDB Mobile: Again, just a nice way to dig through the IMDB. A little slow sometimes is about my only complaint, but since it’s not actually affiliated with IMDB, I can’t complain too much.

  • Google Reader: Though I’m a long time NetNewsWire (and therefore NewsGator) user, I’m experimenting with Google Reader. Their iPhone/iTouch interface is as slick as their web interface, and definitely gives the Newsgator juggernaut some strong competition. Now if I could only sync Google Reader to NetNewsWire….

  • Tricorder: Pure Star Trek silliness. Could really use being recreated as a standalone app so that it doesn’t have the annoying advertising at the bottom. Perhaps using the accelerometer to affect the displays?

And that’s it for me. Any other recommendations from all of you?

Website Tweaks

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One of the projects I’d like to tackle over the summer is redesigning my weblog. I’ve been using this design for a couple years now, and I’ve been thinking that I’m about ready for a change to something a bit cleaner and sparse.

However, as the major project over the next few weeks here at home needs to be packing things up and preparing for a move, I’ve settled for doing a bit of minor tweaking here and there to streamline things where I can.

To that end, here’s a quick rundown of the changes I’ve implemented:

  • Upgraded to the most current version of WordPress. Admittedly, a behind-the-scenes change that won’t really make a difference to visitors, but it was time.

  • The About page has been cleaned up a bit, removing the incomplete bulleted list of other places on the ‘net to find me with a simple in-paragraph listing that’s far more complete. I belong to far too many different networking websites.

  • Rather than listing my tweets in a sidebar box, Twitter Tools and AsideShop will now be displaying them inline with weblog posts using their own lightweight display style. In order to keep my RSS feeds from getting too cluttered up, Advanced Category Excluder prevents tweets from showing up in syndication feeds.

  • iWPhone has been installed so that iPhone/iPod Touch users will automatically get an optimized, lightweight layout.

  • LiveJournal Crossposter has been upgraded, which should (I hope) fix the odd problem I was having with crossposts not appearing in LJ Friends pages. It’s also configured not to crosspost tweets, as they’re already crossposted by Ping.fm.

  • Postalicious will be automatically posting my del.icio.us bookmarks daily around midnight, as long as there are five or more unposted and ready to go, otherwise it will wait until the next day. This allowed me to drop the (huge) ‘eclinkticism’ box out of the sidebar.

  • In another behind-the-scenes change, the WPhone Admin Plugin gives me an iPhone/iPod Touch optimized administration interface, in case I ever need to do any posting or tweaking while on the go.

Eight Point Three

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Blog Directory - Blogged I have no idea how I ended up on their radar, but I’ve just been rated an 8.3 on Blogged.com, some form of directory and rating site for weblogs.

eclecticism at BloggedOur editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it an 8.3 score out of (10) in the Personal Blogs category of Blogged.com.

This is quite an achievement!

We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style.

After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.3 score.

Well, nifty. Works for me! Guess this means I better actually keep doing something with this place, huh? ;)