Read the quote below from The New York Times article “In Baby Boomlet, Preschool Derby Is the Fiercest Yet“:
After years of decline, the number of children under 5 in Manhattan, where the most competitive [pre-school] programs are located, increased by 26 percent between 2000 and 2004, according to census estimates. Yet the number of slots has not kept apace.
Replace “Manhattan” with “San Francisco.” Rinse. Repeat.
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.
Paul Boutin’s Slate article Slate Has 8 Million Readers, Honest has the sub-title “Or maybe it’s 4 million. Which should you believe?” The point? The web offers a level of measurement media has never seen before, and it’s still not complete or agreed upon. Perhaps because the measurements could possibly be so accurate and comparable across different sites, the arguments over minutaie of cookie-deletion rates and the like continue to tie publishers, agencies, advertisers, and the third-party measurement services in knots.
Kudos to the Slate publisher (who is not disinterested) in sharing their internal numbers. I’ve often wondered aloud about whether total transparency would be helpful in this area. As the article notes, I would be hard-pressed to find a single web site whose audience (both unique users and pageviews) wasn’t bigger in internal numbers than the third-party counts.
And with all this, TV ratings haven’t blown up yet? Crazy.
Can’t clear my head enough to add much of use right now, but I’m listening, reading, consuming all the same.
I hope Byrne Reese and the others at Six Apart can lift TrackBack up a level via Submitting TrackBack as an Internet Standard. Ever since November, 2004, CNET News.com has supported TrackBack. Heck, we even put out a press release about it 13 months ago.
Results are mixed. A few gems, but lots of spam (most of which we catch, fortunately). And lots of links to News.com which are not captured/recorded by our systems, probably because folks don’t know to send the ping? I use a Technorati watchlist (feed URL / web URL) as an external monitor for the flood of links actually made to CNET News.com, and TrackBack (Pingback supported, too) isn’t seeing that much usage.
Good luck, Byrne. And send those pings when you link to CNET News.com!
Now even book websites have Flash intros. This is not progress.
The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl is jumping on The Da Vinci Code bandwagon for pseudo-historical fiction, which I classify as fiction involving real people. Paperback edition even has a Dan Brown blurb almost as prominent as the title… guess it worked, because I bought it and read it on the airplane (mostly).
This tale blends the literary leading lights of Boston in the 1860s into a murder mystery. Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, Fields, Tickner, Emerson… all but the last two are lead characters, as Pearl creates a Dante-inspired serial killer moving in lockstep with the Longfellow-led translation of Dante’s masterwork, a first in America.
I took the plunge to buy the book because several of those names were the founders of The Atlantic. I haven’t read Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, even in English. (Cue lament for the decline of classical liberal arts education. OK, enough.) (Full text available free, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.)
Verdict on the book? It’s acceptable, but tries to hard to dress up a murder investigation in historical connections.
I often appreciate the comic strip Rhymes with Orange. The single pane forFebruary 21, 2006 is spectacular, and all parents of those under the age of 10 will understand.
Also, nice URL scheme, as documented here. http://www.rhymeswithorange.com/home.php?date=YYYYMMDD is the format.
This strip, from yesterday, actually shouldn’t be online yet (delay of two weeks to favor the paying customers, newspapers), but the structure is simple and obvious, so I was adding a link even though I thought it wouldn’t work for two weeks. Easter Egg!