Category: Uncategorized

This post is for the many friends and colleagues who — unlike the rest of the country and the world — thought of me (however briefly) when the President announced his choice to replace Sandra Day O’Connor. Walking through Times Square on Friday night, I saw my name (yes, it’s my name, too) on one of the monstrously large news crawls. I better get used to it.

The addition of one more John Roberts to the breathless mix of online news was not welcome news here at clock. I’m sure many, many people pay attention to middle initials (right….) and have noticed that the Supreme Court nominee has the middle initial G, whereas your author has the middle initial B. Unfortunately, Google and every other search engine out there demonstrates quite clearly that first and last names are the common term. clock is sliding in the rankings, and until I do something equally noteworthy, I suppose I’ll just have to live with the demotion. Oh, and the chances of me doing something equally noteworthy? About nil.

Of course, if Mr. Roberts get nominated, he could get as much press as Justice Breyer. Who? Exactly.

The natural air conditioning of San Francisco welcomes me home… wonder how long it will be before I miss the warm evening and heat/humidity of New York City? Probably a while.

Much to catch up on, but not tonight.

It will be quiet for a bit around here. Enjoying some time.

I expect others have been keeping score on this topic, but I wonder how much longer print newspapers will continue to include stock tables? Yesterday, the flagship financial publication in the United States, the Wall Street Journal, announced “Changes Today in Our Financial Tables.” The changes?

The Wall Street Journal is streamlining its financial listings starting with today’s edition as more readers access stock, mutual-fund and other quotations on Internet financial sites, including The Wall Street Journal Online at WSJ.com.

Hmmm… streamlining is a good euphemism for cutting down. I also wonder how many of the people who “access” quotations on “Internet financial sites” are actually doing that “accessing” on WSJ.com. Probably not as many as Dow Jones would hope.

Skeptical reading aside, there is no stopping the digital train here. No newspaper has a choice when it comes to paper for this information. I think it will be another decade here in the United States before the tables disappear from the print edition of the Journal (note: this already happened in Europe and Asia). For volatile information, this is a no-brainer. The follow-on question is… which information is next? Sports scores?

A long, sunny holiday weekend was well misspent. No broadband connectivity, so no temptation to keep up with the online world. Because my current non-fiction read is lengthy, I took a one-day breather with The Da Vinci Code. Yes, I’m a bit late to this mega-best-selling party. The pages turned, and I got what I wanted. Felt like Umberto Eco dumbed down, which is both a wonderful thing and a (mild) disappointment. Historical mysteries are grand, especially with the scavenger hunt aspect thrown in. But where Eco built up the possibilities, and wove a tale that bound me and then cast me aside as it continued to ever-more-ethereal diversions, Dan Brown didn’t lose his story. Everything gets tidied up, perhaps a bit too smoothly. But for a summer beach read, spot on. Eco taunted me with Foucault’s Pendulum because the first third or so was one of the best stories I’ve ever read. Yet, somewhere in the middle, the story dropped from view so Eco could deliver magisterial asides. These snippets are interesting, as long as they are snippets. But they took over the tale in that novel. Anyway, next time I have a few hours to kill, I won’t mind picking up Dan Brown once again, even if he doesn’t live up to the standard set here.

I threw out a link on Wednesday evening, but the RSS promo from work late Thursday afternoon actually drew attention to the News.com tag cloud. Only found two links via Technorati. Several more came up via Feedster. Bloglines citations, too, did pretty well. Here’s the filtered, mixed list of those I could read in English:

• Jim Muttram wants a different sort… one of the available choices gives him what he wants, so UI must work harder to make that more obvious.
• George Scriban wonders if the topics are ad-hoc or pre-defined. The latter.
• Marc Canter throws the credit the wrong way.
• Chen Luyi includes the page in his Saturday links.
• Mercury News notes the page in their Friday round-up.
• Barry Reicherter thinks the page was copied from 43Things. Nope. Not original, of course, but not that single site. I mentioned the mullet.
• Jeff Lundberg wonders, as do we, whether this is useful, or just visually interesting.
• Steve Rubel is paying attention, but thinks the tagging is new. Not quite. Editors have been tagging for years, and the topics have been visible on stories for most of that period. This is just a new visualization of existing information. With luck, the dynamic picture unlocks something of value. Otherwise, it’s just fun to look at… which isn’t a bad thing.
• Garrett French wonders why he would use a tag cloud to navigate CNET News.com rather than existing alternatives. There’s no reason you have to. The page is an experiment. There are also some default options that need to be changed, clearly, because few seem to play with the alternatives much. I vastly prefer the alphabetical view myself.
• Mark Tosczak noted the page’s debut.

Hmmmm…

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.