Month: June 2005

I wonder if this or that matches what Dave Winer is talking about. I think it’s close… which is a coincidence. Happy or not, we’ll see.

P.S. It’s early. I don’t pretend the “a-ha” moment here is 100% clear. Work with me. Want to create one of your own? Let me know and you can be an early adopter, too.

So Coop is podcasting. I love that audio + feed = podcast. Not quite 1 + 1 = 2, but it’s not rocket science. Tools need to get better, though, because even that simplicity is not as easy to create as it should be.

Whether you call them tag clouds, heat maps, or just eclectic ransom notes, I think visual presentations of content via oddly-sized labels are fun to look at. They may even be usable. But let’s not worry about that just yet.

Take a look at an experiment: a tag cloud for News.com. Instead of user-applied tags, these labels are tags applied by the editors, so the popularity of different labels is by the number of stories which earned the label — known as topics — in the last 30 days. There are more ideas for this. For example, I prefer this view. But what do you think? There’s a feedback link… fire away. Or email me at work: john dot roberts at c n e t dot com.

Kudos to A and K for their work on this. Real names withheld only because I didn’t ask them if they minded.

Note: if Zeldman wrote in April that “Tag clouds are the new mullets,” then what does it mean to throw one into the ring in June? Oh well… maybe fashion will come around again… that’s what Web 2.0 is all about, right? What’s old is new again… 2005 is just 1998 with broadband, after all. And that makes all the difference.

By the way, you did try typing in that search field, didn’t you?

I’m not a follower of the Getting Things Done (GTD) threads that weave through so much of the blogosphere. I’m sure I could improve my habits and my life in many ways, but I like to believe that it’s will, not methods, that matter. That’s for me, individually.

For working as a team, though, process — especially shared process — is helpful. We’re trying Agile development practices for a big summer effort, and after some training and jumping right in, I’m optimistic. The best part about the Agile manifesto?

(A preference for) Responding to change over following a plan

When everyone acknowledges that change is a constant and that no one knows everything when starting a project, the pressure lifts… and more good work gets done, collaboratively. There is less waiting around for instruction, and more positive peer pressure to solve problems. It’s only week one. But nothing wrong with a good start.

Michael Tchong made it through the bust years in technology and came out the other side with Iconoculture. Occasional gems keep me subscribed to the email newsletter… this is one of those gems: Lawn Smarts.

Think kickball with (loose) lawn rules.

I’d probably be sore for a week if I played this with the right (wrong) crowd, but it would be worth every ache. Super Size Kick Croquet is only $30, or so the manufacturer recommends. Surprisingly, you can’t buy the product directly, and a few minutes of web-searching turned up some eBay offerings, but nothing direct. I’ll have to keep my eyes open.

I had a long drive without the family this weekend, so in what I took for a spark of brilliance, I decided to find an audiobook online to bring with me in the car. I Googled away for a free book, and ended up at Project Gutenberg, which has a small selection of Audio Book, human-read to accompany their textual efforts.

My choice was A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This is the first Sherlock Holmes book written, and I’ve read it (on paper) at least once, maybe twice. It’s a full-length novel, though many of the Holmes tales are short stories. Listening changes the reading, and I found the story still engrossing but the writing itself little more than serviceable at times… which I’ve never noticed while physically reading these tales.

It was mildly frustrating to download each of the 14 sections one by one, but a fast connection and the context-sensitive menu in Safari (“Download linked file”) made the process pretty slick. Even more impressive was the way iTunes broke up the playlist into four CDs seamlessly, and made something I’ve never done before as easy as a process repeated for years. Given all the crazy things that could happen, that’s actually quite impressive. The CDs played beautifully in the car, but I didn’t finish the novel on the drive, so brought them into the house. The CD/DVD player in the living room choked on the disc (the format?), so we listened to the last 40 minutes on the computer. Much harder to focus sitting in a room than in the driver’s seat, but happy to top it off.

I’m happy to give away the four-CD set to the next interested listener.

A milestone for the girl, marked by a wide smile through chocolate cupcake frosting. That’s powerful stuff.

I’m not talking about the frosting.

I recently finished the July/August issue of The Atlantic. Formerly The Atlantic Monthly, the magazine is now published 10 times a year, and (thanks, Peter) is moving from Boston to Washington, D.C. (old article from April, now behind the pay wall at NYTimes.com). History and geography aside, I enjoy reading the magazine… but most of the recent pieces are not something to make you smile about. The cover story, Countdown to a Meltdown, by Jim Fallows, is available only to subscribers. That’s too bad, but maybe America can continue its shiny, happy path to economic quagmire and political stagnation if no one feels compelled to change course by listening to Cassandra. Except I don’t think Jim Fallows deserves to be ignored like Cassandra here. And Scott Stossel’s North Korea: The War Game isn’t about to make you sleep well, either. I know both Jim and Scott, and respect their thinking enormously, so I want these wake-up calls to get more attention. Try and get your hands on the July/August issue, and do some thinking.

As a former employee (it’s been 9+ years), I’m curious to see which of the Boston staff I still know is making the move to D.C. If anyone from The Atlantic comes across this post, let me know… email is jbr at the domain name of this blog.

Narendra noticed that Walt Mossberg blogs about baseball (Red Sox fan… boo!)… and Walt commented. Nice!

Warning… loosely coupled thoughts ahead.

I didn’t go to Korea, so I didn’t hear Simon Waldman’s talk at the World Editors Forum, but at least he posted the gist of his speech. As the Director of Digital Publishing for Guardian Newspapers, Waldman sits at the intersection of how people stay informed, at least in the UK. He shares his uncertainty about how RSS and aggregation are changing things for readers and for media businesses like his (and my employer). The point: readers are benefitting from these services, even if media businesses are not. While I won’t share numbers, I agree with the general point Waldman makes: it’s hard to unequivocally say whether RSS has increased or decreased traffic to sites like ours… but there is no going back. Nor do I want to.

After all, creating and aggregating are interconnected, and have been for years. The evaporation of the false distinction between them is simply a matter of technology opening up a previously closed door between two adjacent rooms. (Or maybe kicking the door down.) Vin Crosbie reminds us that most media companies do not create their own content. His point is that arguing about whether Google fits the label “media company” is a moot point. By all definitions, Google and Yahoo and anyone else informing and entertaining people earn their audience, and no labels are going to limit their growth, financial or otherwise.

Still, the world hasn’t changed yet because (repeat after me) it’s still early in this evolution. Current RSS readers (client, web-based, mobile, whatever) are Neanderthals, and I include the one I’m working on in that broad, unfair label. homo sapiens is around the corner somewhere, waiting to out-think these early efforts. Of course, technological — and reader — evolutions don’t require that the next generation be genetically distinct from the earlier generations, so the current players won’t all disappear. We’ll see.

Waldman’s notes reminded me in some ways of what Matt McAlister shared after the Syndicate conference. What if RSS replaces websites the same way websites are replacing newspapers and magazines? Food for thought.

Media watchers like Tim Porter and Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis chronicle the irony of media companies reporting (slowly, imperfectly) the factors which are bringing some of these same outlets to their economic knees. The stumble is both slow enough to watch and yet fast enough to discern. I think these are fascinating times both to be a consumer of information and a producer (whether as creator or aggregator). And few are more voracious consumers than those who also produce. Many bloggers, though by no means all, are either in media or want to be (replace?) media. Be careful what you wish for!

From The Importance of RSS by Kevin Hale over at ParticleTree:

Even though broadband technology is getting faster, the pace of information development is forcing internet surfers to skip the eye-candy for the luxury of skimming.

Do you enjoy being skimmed? Is there a business for those being skimmed? Or must you be a skimmer? I don’t know, but I’m paying attention… even as I pick and choose from each day’s offerings.