Day: March 3, 2006

Origami frustrates me.

I’m not talking tech here, despite all the recent press (and follow-up stories).

I’m talking about folding paper.

The boy has some dinosaur (of course) origami, and this stuff is too damn hard. Maybe it’s just faulty instructions, or maybe this is an advanced set (I hope so!), but I’d rather back up my computer, which has been a frustrating, still-incomplete experience in its own right, than try and fold another Yangchuanosaurus.

But few things make him happier right now, so I am grateful that there are only a handful of these beasts left in the set. I suppose I should put the rose-colored glasses on and be thrilled to be a father here, but damn.

What’s more fun about being a father is coming home and listening to the boy read a book to his sister, which I also got to do last night. So I suppose there is balance in the world.

On Thursday, February 16, the Center for Media Research published Reading: A Vital Part of Human Experience as its Daily Brief. This is a report pulling interesting data from a presentation by Gavin O’Reilly in January 2006. Several interesting stats in the Brief, but the headline caught my eye, and it was pulled from this quote:

In a presentation to brokers and corporate bankers in London recently, the President of WAN, Gavin O’Reilly, demonstrated that print media continues to be successful in both readership and revenue terms and that “reading is still a vital ingredient in the human experience.”

While I believe in reading, and print media is still successful in readership and revenue terms (even while declining in most markets), seems like a false syllogism to suggest that print and reading are logically connected. I didn’t read Mr. O’Reilly’s presentation, but I read about it online.

Tiny point, probably, but I find these connect the dot moments telling in their biases.

(Strangely, if you follow my link to the Daily Brief above, the date shows up as today’s date… but I get the e-mail newsletter, and it arrived on February 16.)

Yesterday’s Google analyst day commanded a lot of attention worldwide from the press and their customers. CNET News.com was no exception. What I didn’t realize until I got home last night and had a chance to take a look at my colleagues’ coverage was that we took three simple steps to make our coverage more useful, as you can witness in Live: Google faces off with analysts.

First, Elinor Mills did a running transcript of the webcast. Not verbatim, but lots of detail and quotes. Simple enough, but pretty darn useful since I know I didn’t want to spend hours on this, and the real source information is certainly of interest to many.

Second, some of the most interesting audio clips are presented in page. This is not new, but it’s slightly more elegantly done now with an in-page Flash player.

Third — and this one literally caught my eye — key passages are highlighted in yellow. The transcript is long, so “editing” to call attention to the important points saves the reader time without cutting the parts which may be important to some for unique reasons.

None of this is rocket science, but all three combined make for really useful information.

One problem (which I’ll discuss later this morning): the transcript was so live that it’s in reverse chronological order, which makes for weird reading after the fact.

I haven’t been back to Newsvine since writing my review of the private beta, so I don’t know what has changed (if anything), but now you can see for yourself. From Mike Davidson, the leader of the team… Newsvine Launches.