A brief respite from the yammering about curmudgeons, interns, naivete vs. nihilism and all the rest of the debate over whether or not newspapers will be considered a curiosity in less than 2 years’ time… I got to this thru a post on the Poynter site, and man, is this ever addicting. I’m a big [...] [...more]
A brief respite from the yammering about curmudgeons, interns, naivete vs. nihilism and all the rest of the debate over whether or not newspapers will be considered a curiosity in less than 2 years’ time…
I’m a big fan of any tool that helps the user filter, organize and digest data according to his/her needs, and this one definitely shows promise. It’s an IBM tool called “many eyes” and what it does is form graphic representations of complex data in ways that allow you to click through and follow from a central starting point thread, where it leads… The visualization of the salmonella outbreak does what a great infographic should do – it presents complex data in an easily grasped visual way, and shows the relationships between various data streams.
I typed in my own search string to the tool – check out the results:
Today in online video: Steve Jobs' keynote gets the Mahalo squeeze and Comedy Central takes a big, bad step towards digital integration. [...more]
Still struggling with assessing, organizing and condensing all the information I’ve been taking in, so my posts here and at Hard News have been sporadic, at best. This situation looks like it will persist for at least another week, so in the meantime, I’m resorting to the old faithful “aggregate and snark” model of blogging.
First, over at Mahalo, here’s a really neat condensation of Steve Jobs’ iPhone 2.0 speech into 60 seconds containing the most relevant bits of information. I know that for the walleyed Apple “f@nb01s” this may be heresy … but I kinda dig the way this was edited. The quick hits at the end of the vid were definitely a hoot – they really show how much of a “hurry hurry hurry step right up” carnival barker Jobs is…
The article describes what they see as a possible conflict between cable operators and Comedy Central – that having content providers putting their best stuff online is generating that “giant sucking sound” of viewers abandoning the increasingly less-broad “broadcast” offerings. Viz:
Eventually, if this is not already the case in a small number of instances, it may lead to what’s known as “cable bypass”–individuals may opt to cancel their cable subscriptions.
Nonetheless, it is remarkable just how many TV shows’ full episodes are available on the Internet (with a relatively low commercial load), including most of the top network scripted series and many in cable. Arguably, the only premium broadcast content not available in full online are certain sports events and “American Idol.”
The Daily Show’s page on Hulu looks spectacular. Someone really paid attention to not only eye-pleasingdesign, but to quick & painless navigability. In fact, the whole front page and user experience of Hulu is worlds better than when I first encountered it back in January.
Man, I love, love LOVE the controls that Hulu has built into its video player. The pop-out control especially comes in handy for a multi-monitor, multi-tasker like me. Also, the 5-second pre-roll and associated ad from Honda are absolutely perfect … non-instrusive, not annoying, and I dig the way that they respect me. Can’t believe how much better this is than before. So far there’s only 76 episodes up of this, but I can see where this is headed. I wonder if the ad presence there is enough to capitalize all this development right now (I’m guessing NOT at the moment), but if they’re operating under the theory of aggregating the audience/eyeballs right now so that things pay off down the road, this is certainly a strong step in the right direction.
I’ve been blogging for more than three years now on the Typepad platform, and have finally taken the leap to WordPress. It’s not because Typepad was bad – although it was a little clunky at first, and I haven’t ever really been happy with their recommendations on how to deal with video – but more [...] [...more]
I’ve been blogging for more than three years now on the Typepad platform, and have finally taken the leap to WordPress. It’s not because Typepad was bad – although it was a little clunky at first, and I haven’t ever really been happy with their recommendations on how to deal with video – but more a case of me wanting to start exerting more control over the design of the blog, and its location. Basically, I’ve outgrown Hard News, Inc. So, rather than try to make the old “brand” learn some new dance steps, I’ve decided to start afresh over here at Artesian Media.
I feel a little sad at leaving the Hard News blog behind – it was my first foray into blogging on my own, although by that point, I had been a web editor and publisher for 10 years. I remember feeling euphoric at first – I was able to publish on my own, any time I wanted, about anything I felt like, without having to spend hours on the phone to coders in Bangalore! When I wanted to move items in a list around, add or change photos, change the number, size and location of the text columns, I just clicked on a few radio buttons, and zammo! Hit F5 and everything’s changed.
Since that time, I’ve seen the blogosphere really start to codify and fall into predictable patterns. Flame wars have their own cartoon graphics explaining their life cycle. Everyone gripes the same about trackback spam and script kiddies haxxoring your database and putting “U R Pwned” up in place of all your precious bits of Joycean stream-of-consciousness wisdom.
I kinda want to take the best bits of Hard News and migrate them over here – not only because some of them are (at least in my opinion) damn good, but also to multitask. I’ve always adopted the Army ethos of “Never ask your men to do something you wouldn’t or couldn’t do yourself.” Well, now that a great deal of my professional life revolves around taking traditional print journalists (as I was for the greater part of my career) and guiding them on their first steps on the multimedia path, one of the things that I try to do is to look at the technologies and knowledge that content producers are going to have to master, and then to force myself into their shoes for a stroll.
So yeah, part of what I’m doing here is using myself as a guinea pig, to see how difficult it’s going to be to try to migrate over about 3 years’ worth of content from Typepad.
Stay tuned, watch this space, and thanks for checking in.
Because surfing the Internet is like drinking from a firehose, David LaFontaine braves the torrent to tell you what trends and technologies to gulp down, swirl in your mouth, or spit out.
