Category: Uncategorized

Mustapha from ZDNet France was kind enough to answer answer my plea for a Newsvine invite, and now I’ve found time to gather my thoughts.

Newsvine gets many things right. I just don’t know if that’s enough.

The Newsvine team built a content management system for the new media world, which is smart. Useful, human-readable (and guessable!) URLs are built into the system. Revenue incentives for participation are built into the system from the start, rather than bolted on later. (That will save aggravation down the road, certainly.) Content from all sources is treated natively. Simplicity in the design is consistent. I liked what I saw.

Read I am dismayed that the recent Nature article on how web users make snap decisions (50 milliseconds) is already behind a paywall. But I’ll link to it anyway in this context because with Newsvine, the entire introductory experience felt really good until I got to the home page, the front door of my news experience. Then Newsvine felt much the same as other news sites, visually. That’s probably a good thing in some regards (we’re all perviously trained to some degree) but the importance, and distinctiveness, of the “Vine” (reader-contributed material) is not made apparent.

Seed is the term Newsvine uses for sharing/submitting a link for others to follow. Since this contribution has a much lower bar than Write (see below), I expect the greatest value to the “Vine” to come from its Seeds. Of course, this is the area with the most competition, too. I watch the Digg phenomenon and don’t know whether the world has definitely changed, or whether another geek trend is running rampant among the digital early adopters without crossing over. (NOTE: Those who recognize which trends will cross over, and when, are very, very successful. I don’t claim to be one of them, though I’m paying close attention all the same.)

Write Is it the goal to get everyone who would otherwise start a blog, or join a blog network, to make Newsvine their oar in the water? Everybody’s a participant is the banner of the new wave, after all. Catch some of the next wave of participants without worrying about the reaction of the early adopters? (But then how do you reach a new audience?)

I admire putting everyone on an equal footing, and letting the best writers get the value, but with so many places to share opinions and more, I guess I wouldn’t bet on Newsvine being the platform of choice for that level of contribution. The really strong writers can get the same level of return elsewhere, I expect.

Specifics
A few tidbits…

• Nice animation of the voting action. Felt like the right speed… not too slow to be annoying, not too fast to make me wonder “what the heck happened?” or “did anything happen?”
• Smooth use of Ajax for the choice of domain: (CNET does something similar for username, another province with a limited namespace where repeated “that’s already taken” messages would be especially frustrating if a page re-load was required.)
• Love that everything is a feed. I’m not surprised, but it’s still worth noting.
• I’ve never seen the label JSS before. Newsvine doesn’t expand the acronym beyond giving a parenthetical (javascript) label. The feature is simply a Javascript call for inserting a feed into your site or blog without anything more than line of code. There are many, many examples of this kind of code. Newsvine has made it prominent and consistent. I wonder if JSS will take off as a label for this functionality?
• Only quibble with the Feeds section is so many choices: six of them. Yes, the granularity is welcome, but I’d suggest progressive disclosure of the complexity. There is always a best default choice for the reader. Make it.
• Audio and video may be second-order problems for Newsvine, but I didn’t see any audio or video, and I only came across images associated with AP stories. I admit it’s unfair to carp at a new service for not doing everything at once, but a lot of careful thought went into what’s showing, so I hope these are envisioned, if not yet implemented.
• Newsvine has great URLs, but if you have to teach people how to use your URLs as navigation, aren’t you expecting a bit much?
  

  “Tags are great for writers, but they are equally great for readers. Are you looking for news on Saddam Hussein? Just go to newsvine.com/saddam-hussein. No need to even search Google.” [Company info page, “Writing on Newsvine” section]

  I’d leave it as an Easter Egg, personally.

• The History tool is slick. I have one suggestion. Show me what I’ve read, in addition to the more explicit actions.

I’m in this same competitive arena, broadly, so I hope my biases are (a) clear and (b) not overly coloring my evaluation. I want new ideas to succeed. I’ve been working on online publications since 1993, and I think the medium still has a long way to go in addressing the human needs in the most satisfactory way. That challenge is one which I take personally, not just professionally. (Although the lack of design of my blog may give the opposite impression!)

I believe news organizations will benefit from the Newsvine lessons, and maybe even envy the content management system, but Newsvine looks like a solution in search of an audience at this point.

Please let me know if you’d like an invite. I won’t hand them out indiscriminately (read here for why), but if you’re reading this, you’re hardly a random stranger. 😉

So I saw some of the raves for Opera Mini, the new mobile phone web browser, especially Russell Beattie’s excitement: “Opera Mini: Best Mobile Web Browser Bar None.”

So I fired up the Treo 650, and used the installed web browser, Blazer (I think), and went to mini.opera.com. It was very smooth until the very last bit. The Opera server properly recognized my phone (due to the user-agent, I’m sure) as a Treo 650. I was offered a link to download the 210K .prc file, and the dialogs from there were smooth (not sure whether that’s Palm OS or Opera, or both).

I went to open Mini, and then I ran into the gap which blocks me from using it at all: “Please ensure that IBM’s WebSphere Micro Environment Java VM is installed.” Damn. How do I find a Treo-based method for (a) finding and (b) installing that? Palm.com, ironically, does no browser detect, and gives me a mobile-unfriendly site.

So I used Google on the phone. First result is a Palm support site, and the second result is an IBM site. Neither one offers a mobile download/install, so I’ll have to download to a computer and sync it over.

Curses… this was almost as easy as it’s supposed to be.

Anyone have a link directly to what I need? Is this something I can install via the current web browser on the phone?

Don’t have time to watch it tonight, but interested to learn via Ben Metcalfe that the BBC has put its 30 minute documentary The world according to Google online in full.

Overall, I’ve found the Bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse experience with Mac OS X to be a mild improvement over the wired experience. The battery drain and replacement routine frustrates, but it’s only every few weeks, so it’s tolerable.

BUT I’ve now found a real aggravation. If I start my iMac G5 in Safe Boot mode, I can’t do anything because Bluetooth is disabled, so both mouse and keyboard are unrecognized. So I’ll need to borrow a wired keyboard and mouse (no, I didn’t keep them) tonight, and see then if Safe Boot lets me solve the problem.

Don’t encourage me to go wireless, Apple, and then leave me without a paddle when the stream gets a little “chunky.”

I want to use Safe Boot mode because I’m still working through my week-long (so far) odyssey to backup my data. Laptop is completed, but there appears to be something awry at low levels of the desktop disk. Everything works (knock on wood), so it hasn’t been a problem (yet?), but now I’m more eager than ever to backup.

Problem may have been triggered (or exacerbated) by enabling the Repair Permissions in SuperDuper after doing the recent iTunes update in Mac OS X 10.3.9, per Shirt Pocket:

The problem here is that you’re running 10.3.9 and tried to repair permissions after installing the latest iTunes update. Apple has caused some sort of problem when the new iTunes with Panther’s Repair Permissions code, and it causes the repair permissions code (inside OSX) to crash.

I’ve received significant, useful, clear support from Dave Nanian at Shirt Pocket through this entire week, starting even before I purchased a license (which I did do). Makes me happier with my purchase and a willing evangelist for SuperDuper.

So 37signals reminds us that we could all use some editors to give our words a diet with “The positive side effect of big text: less text.” I’ll stop now. Even if I didn’t make the font bigger. I know some sites (cough) which could take some of this to heart.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell dripped through my reading time over the last two weeks. This one has been on my list since October 2004, so it’s about time. Time, that is, for more fiction set in the early 1800s, during the Napoleonic wars.

The two magicians of the title help fight the war, too, with phantom fleets, helpful weather, and temporary roads for Wellington’s troops to chase the French north out of Portugal. Magic as a political tool, with society manners, Lord Byron, Venice, academic jealousy, and lots of footnotes. The footnotes are fun, ranging from little vignettes from “history” (the magical history of England) to a parallel publishing war amongst magical periodicals.

The website says the story has been optioned for a film. We’ll see. I bet a second novel (yes, this is Susanna Clark’s first) comes first. Metacritic score of 83 is deserved. More novels from Clark would be welcome.

(Updated a few times… see end of entry.)

At the tail end of last week, I found 45 minutes to wander around at Macworld. My one goal — beyond seeing the show — was to find a solid external hard drive, with at least a FireWire400 interface. So I picked up a ROCPRO 400 AV 3.5″ FireWire 400 External Hard Drive. Choice was based on what was available and seemed to be reasonably priced. I’ve waited long enough, so availability leading into the three-day weekend helped me pull the trigger.

Of course, it’s the last of those three days, and I started partitioning the drive over 30 minutes ago, and it doesn’t look like it will be done for another 45 minutes if the progress bar is to be believed. Argh. I’m simply using the Disk Utility software bundled with the Mac OS… maybe I should have looked around for something faster. But at least the process is in progress.

My steps are:

• Partition the drive. I want to back up both the 250GB internal from the iMac and the 80GB internal from the PowerBook, so one partition for each.
• Install Tiger on both partitions. I’ve been postponing the upgrade on both computers until I do a backup.
• Back up the laptop. Planning to use SuperDuper… which I’ve downloaded, but not yet installed or purchased.
• Upgrade to Tiger on the laptop. There are a few pieces of data on the laptop which are critical, but less disruptive to daily flow if I run into any glitches with that computer.
• Repeat last two steps for iMac. And then I can try and figure out what kind of schedule to do incremental backups on.

I will update this post when it’s all done, with any notable events or glitches. I am no longer optimistic that it will all be done today.

The only rule when all of this is done? Backing up must be mindlessly easy.

Update, Monday Jan 16, 8pm PT

Well, the laptop went well, although it took much longer than I envisioned, in large part because I asked SuperDuper to repair permissions before making the copy. But the laptop (on which I’m typing) is now running Tiger, and has been updated to 10.4.4, and the backup is complete and valid up until the OS upgrade.

The desktop is still in progress. It ran over 21 hours in the “Repair Permissions” segment of the process, so I finally stopped it, and set it to make the original backup… which looks like it will run at least overnight. I hope no longer.

Update, Wednesday Jan 18, 7:20pm PT

The desktop got stuck after only 600MB or so. I restarted and tried again. No dice. Got stuck in a similar place (by MB). The log portion of SuperDuper came in handy, as I emailed the details to the support address and, even before I’ve become a paying customer, I got a helpful response pointing out that the recent iTunes update for 10.3.9 (which I’m on, until I backup… Catch 22!) broke the “Repair permissions” function. That doesn’t explain why I still can’t successfully run the backup without that option, despite restarting a few times, and dumping the original partition and letting SuperDuper create one instead. I’ll try a few more things… but I’m certainly buying SuperDuper for the laptop.

First time in a long time I’ve watched two movies back-to-back… following The Constant Gardener, we put on Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. This pun-filled animated amusement was spot on. Couldn’t have stayed awake for anything deeper, either.

Metacritic score of 87 seems high, but this is excellent for its type. The Aardman folks aren’t Pixar, but they deliver.

The Constant Gardener moves too slowly. The story is interesting (if a bit shallow in points), but I wanted a conspiracy thriller to move more quickly. Also, the key husband and wife relationship felt impossible to me. Maybe the book gave the depth which is hinted at, but skipped, in the movie.

John Le Carré wrote the book from which this movie was made. Le Carré made his name with cold war spy thrillers. While current events now would seem to point to Russia being worth watching still, we don’t have a simple enemy to use in movies anymore. In The Constant Gardener, global drug companies are asked to fill the “simply enemy” role, as environmental and ethical terrorists testing drugs on Kenyans without their consent. A bit much, although I’m sure there are elements of the caricature which ring true.

Africa — in this movie, Nairobi and (in one sequence) Sudan — shows as sunblasted landscape and human despair. The scenes in the rest of Europe, especially in London, are just overtly grey, damp, and gloomy.

Metacritic score of 82 shows why this is an Oscar candidate, I suppose. A faster pace, and I would have leaned towards a higher opinion of the movie.

Brokeback Mountain is a good movie, though tough to live up to the hype. The Metacritic 87 is the highest score I’ve seen in my short experience with Metacritic. On the all-time scores Brokeback Mountain ties for 64th… note, however, that Metacritic has only been around for ~5 years, and while they are working backwards to include films from the pre-internet era, it’s not a comprehensive list in any way before 2001.

Strangest part about watching the film for me was that all I knew going in is that it’s a love story about gay cowboys. Most movies about love stories build to a match, so when the central couple gets together early in the film, I didn’t know what to expect for the rest of the movie.

The mountains of Wyoming play a gorgeous supporting role.