Must try this out…

Overstream allows you to add captions/subtitles to your YouTube or other videos. Awesome. (UPDATE: Now YouTube allows you to add captions directly to YouTube videos — see the May 2009 blog post here on the topic.)

Accessibility article

Opera developer James Edwards makes a point about AJAX and accessibility. I definitely see, and mostly agree with, his point. But one must consider the subtleties. If a particular user interaction makes a function significantly more simple for most users to understand or interact with, but it’s not accessible, the developer has to do a lot of soul searching. Is the solution as good? His Flickr remake example works, but it’s nowhere near as appealing as Flickr’s current interface. You have to edit all the fields at once. You have to take extra steps, as a sighted user, to work with the page. But most importantly, it looks nothing like your final product when you’re interacting with it. That’s the appeal of Flickr’s current interface…there’s no difference in the admin interface and the end-user interface. It just works.

So while the point is very well taken, there has to be some happy medium, for the sake of usability. We can’t throw away, or significantly dumb down, some ideal usability for mainstream users simply to make something ideally accessible. We should make it BOTH accessible AND usable at the same time. It can be done, but it’s hard.

Watch your words

SXSW Interactive continues in Texas, and amid the announcements of party attendance, hangovers, and meetups, some insightful stuff does bubble to the top. Tiff Fehr, a smart and talented Digital Web Magazine staffer, posted about her experiences on day three of the conference. The final point she makes is an excellent one for anyone in the public eye, whether a writer, a software developer, or even a curmudgeon — you are your brand. Remember this when you post to social networks.

People who are interested in your work will look at your blog, sure. But they’ll also look at your Flickr pictures, your Facebook comments, your Twitter tweets. All those together build onto any brand that you intentionally try to develop for yourself. That can work really well for you, supplementing your corporate identity with a bit of humanity or humor or dynamism. But it can also torpedo the hard work you’ve done to establish a brand in the first place. Sure, you might look respectable on your blog, but when your Flickr feed is full of dog fights and you shoot off your foul mouth in your YouTube phonecam videos, you’re not doing your brand any favors. And by extension, you’re not helping your business, whether you work for yourself or someone else.

When social networks die…

I found myself saying to a colleague this morning, “Orkut has gone the way of Friendster.” We were mulling over the reasons why certain social networks last, while others go the way of the summer fling.

I’ll admit it, I join every social network I see, more or less. If there’s anything particularly intriguing about a site, I’ll throw my hat into the ring. And I’ve found that the networks that I continue to use are the ones that offer me something other than social networking as a primary draw. Why do I still use Flickr? Because no matter what computer I’m on, no matter where in the world I am, I can find my pictures. While I’m not a knitter, I have learned from Ravelry members that it’s the bees knees, not primarily because of the other people, but because it offers tools to knitters that they’ve not had before — at least not at this level. The fact that there are other people in the Ravelry world to share with is just the proverbial icing.

Having things in common isn’t enough to sustain a social networking relationship. Perhaps it is in the real world — you can sit down over coffee and talk about the finale of The Wire, or the silly Olympics logo. But asynchronous relationships based on two-dimensional interactions are transient. There’s not much to hold your interest, and plenty of other shiny things to distract you.

For a social network to be really meaningful, it has to first be in service to the individual member somehow. It has to draw the user to it for a reason other than connecting with other people. Interest in Facebook (or is it facebook?) is waning, but it hasn’t tanked as quickly as Friendster (or mySpace) because someone is always sending you a new app, or a Zombie Bite, or an invitation to a game of Scrabble. But I sense even that will lose its appeal soon enough.

So, what explains the popularity and sustained success of LinkedIn? I’m still not sure how it fits into the paradigm. LinkedIn is different things for different people. For me, it’s a place to keep a skeleton copy of my c.v., and a place to keep track of people I am not regularly in touch with — so if someone’s email address changes, I’ll still be able to find her. For recruiters, it has very little to do with the social networking, and a lot about the résumé. Perhaps that’s the answer, then — it’s the Flickr of résumés. It’s a place for me to maintain a pointer to me, in case anyone’s looking for me. My relationships with others on LinkedIn are less important to me than my own details…but it sure is fun to find old friends from high school, and see where they ended up.

I guess the lesson learned here is, social networking for the sake of it, simply to exploit similarities in relationships, will always be short-lived. Anticipation, then excitement, then early adoption, then critical mass, then waning. It’s the relationships based on more than just proximity (even virtual proximity) that really seem to last.

Another awesome service

I like Macs. I really do. And I need a .Mac account for syncing my calendar and Yojimbo. But .Mac stinks. I try to keep three computers synced, and it always seems that one or more of them doesn’t sync properly. All the machines are up to date, all software on the same version, but I regularly have to delete my sync data or perform some other magic trick to get syncing to work.

I have some workarounds for that. I’ve started using Sandy (UPDATE: Sandy’s now gone. )to track my calendar entries, and I just have all my iCals subscribe to her syndicated version of my calendar. I try to make sure that I massage my .Mac periodically so my Yojimbo entries sync. I don’t worry about bookmarks, and Address Book contacts seem to sync eventually, so I’m usually OK.

But files. OH FILES. I hate carrying a thumb drive. I fear losing them. I worry I’ll forget them. But whenever I am connected to my iDisk and try to save something on my MacBookPro, the machine hangs. DotMac is just not my friend.

Enter Jungle Disk. On the one hand, it’s so simple, I shouldn’t have to pay for it. On the other hand, $20 for a lifetime of software support and upgrades as an interface to the gignormous Amazon S3 servers is kind of a no-brainer. I could spend a few hours figuring out how to tap into S3 myself, sure. I know I’d be able to do it eventually. But my time is worth more than $20 an hour, so why not outsource that? I did. I bought a Jungle Disk client license.

I used the service for a month. I took everything off of my .Mac account and moved it onto my Jungle Disk. At 10-cents-per-gig download and 18-cents-per-gig upload, it wasn’t a budget breaker. My first month’s bill from Amazon was 21 cents. I can work on Mechanical Turk for about five minutes and make that back.

Jungle Disk works just like a regular WebDav connection. It’s a bit slower than write-to-disk, but not so much so that it is annoying or anything. And today, Jungle Disk 1.5 was released. For $1 a month (first 12 months free), you can have web access to your files, encrypted or not (you decide).

If only there were a way to sync my Yojimbo data reliably, I’d be dumping that $99 annual .Mac fee.

Web services that work

Remember years ago, that neat service that got a lot of press, Wildfire? It was one of those services that you could call, and it did voice recognition — a woman’s voice responded, and she was your personal assistant. But it was expensive and complicated, and the company went for enterprise-level. On the other hand, enter Jott. Free (at least for now) service that you can call — it transcribes and then forwards your voice messages to anyone else’s email or SMS. Now, that’s just dandy, and I probably wouldn’t use it just for that…I’m rarely away from my email for so long that I can’t wait to get someone a message, and if it’s that important, I’ll just call.

But now imagine if that service could send your messages not to other humans, but to other SERVICES. That’s where IWantSandy comes in. Sandy is your personal assistant, and to get her to do stuff or remember stuff, you just send her an email, or even cc: her on an email to someone else. Any date/time/event/contact information is extracted from the email, and added to your Sandy repository. Which is fine and dandy, except I already use iCal. Well. Sandy also syndicates your Sandy calendar, so you can subscribe to it in iCal, and then the events in your Sandy calendar show up as events in your everyday calendar — even syncing to your iPod or iPhone or other PDA that speaks iCal.

The other day, I had Sandy remember stuff about Thanksgiving. I even told her what I was going to need from the grocery store. Now, when I get to the store, I can drop Sandy a quick note (or call her through Jott) asking her for my grocery list, and she’ll email my grocery list to my phone.

When I started using these services, I wanted to dive in and figure out how they work, so that I could tweak them to within an inch of their lives. I started reading the developer API doc. Then Sandy sent me a reminder about an upcoming event, and I stopped reading. I have a basic enough understanding of how it works. But what’s more important is THAT it works. As Ben Schneiderman said at World Usability Day New England 2007, it’s not about what computers can do, it’s about what you can do with computers.

I was telling a colleague about these services this morning. He thought the confluence of these services was pretty cool, and then he asked if any of our ‘clients’ had been asking for this kind of support. I explained that, no, these are bleeding-edge kinds of uses, and only the earliest of adopters would be using them — and those folks can generally support themselves. But what if we set up Jott/Sandy accounts FOR them, and just told them how to use the services? Not how they work, not the ins and outs, just, “Call this number, say these things, and then in five minutes, sync your iPod, and it’ll show up.” We could even create our own wrapper around the services, so as to not make them scary and intimidating or disjointed, or even make them not seem Web 2.0 (which some folks DO find scary). Just, hey, here’s a cool thing. Call, wait, sync. Period.

I’m going to have to play with these some more.

Am I a Journalist?

There’s been a good bit of discussion these days regarding journalism — what is it, who’s doing it, are bloggers ‘journalists’ — and it’s got me thinking. OK, honestly, my first thought was, “It’s a semantic discussion, and that’s stupid.” And that’s true. Call yourself what you want, people will nitpick over syntax, and I will sit over here and drink my coffee. And I’ll still believe that is the answer to the question of whether or not bloggers are journalists.

But I don’t think that’s the real question. I think the real question is, “Is the writing/reporting done by bloggers as important/useful/respectable/etc. as that of reporters and editors working in the conventional news business?” The answer to this is much more complex. One point to get out of the way right off is that the conventional news business has sunk to a profoundly low level in many places. If a blogger wants to associate herself with what mainstream media has become, then good for her. But let’s consider also that there is, in fact, some really good journalism going on in some places. That there are reporters, editors, and photographers who really do want to write well for the communities they serve. That there really are journalists out there who aren’t manipulated by advertisers, who work very hard to avoid bias, who are trustworthy, and as such, have good connections. There are journalists who are willing to spend time at libraries, in archives, in people’s offices, and out on the street to really get news — and not just news, but news and context. Then we pair these journalists up with editors and fact-checkers, and there we have some serious media. Excellent reportage, good storytelling, clean grammar. This is sort of the pinnacle of journalism — what society seems to want journalists to be. (Certainly what I wish the media was today in greater measure.)

Some of these journalists blog. The fact that they blog doesn’t make them journalists, but journalists who blog. There may also be bloggers who do the sort of stuff I mention above, even though they don’t work in the mainstream media. I can’t think of any good examples right now, but I do leave open the possibility that such a person exists. (Feel free to comment with suggestions.) But we still haven’t touched on another important definition of a journalist, and that is, what is a journalist’s role in her community? Whether her community is Peoria, Illinois, or the reality-distortion field that is the blogosphere, she brings a certain value to that community by doing what she does, and has a certain obligation to the community that she serves. Some folks have articulated quite nicely what those roles and responsibilities are. In the introduction to their book The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel list “some clear principles that journalists agree on — and that citizens have a right to expect.”

1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.
2. Its first loyalty is to citizens.
3. Its essence is a discipline of verification.
4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.
5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant.
8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.
9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.

Do most bloggers do this? No. A vast number of self-proclaimed citizen journalists don’t, in fact, meet most of these precepts (especially 2, 3, and 8 — even TalkingPointsMemo doesn’t allow public comments on its feature articles as far as I can tell, only on its blog posts). Does that mean these bloggers aren’t journalists? Nope. A blogger can surely be a journalist. Some blog posts on some blogs are definitely good examples of solid journalism. But as I have told my son on occasion, “You’re not a bad boy, you’re a good boy who did a pretty rotten thing.” Or remember the old apothegm, “Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.” You don’t have to go to J-school to be a journalist. You don’t even have to work for someone who pays you and reads your stuff and then publishes it. But you do have to ensure that your writing consistently adheres to journalistic principles (including, but not limited to, the Sigma Delta Chi code of ethics).

Journalism doesn’t sell, though. It’s not sexy. When done right, it requires an investment of time and thought on the part of the consumer, and lots of people simply don’t care to think anymore. Kind of like public schools — everyone knows they have value, but no one’s really willing to pay for them. Other stuff’s more important, right? Like a fancy iPhone. So I can read my blogs on the go. (No, I don’t really have an iPhone. But I have been known to read blogs on my mobile phone. It is 2007, after all.)

So, to finally answer my own question that I posed in the title of this post. Am I a journalist? Yeah. Yes, I think I am. I spent ten years working for newspapers and magazines in various editorial capacities — from ‘abstracter of press releases’ to ‘reporter’ to ‘fact-checker’ to ‘features editor’ to ‘editor’ (and a few titles in between). I understand the importance of journalistic ethics, and responsibility to readers. But my blog isn’t a place where I try to practice journalism. I rant and rave about my wacky opinions. Sure, there might be a fact or two in there, but really, I’m just shilling for my perspective on the mortal coil. And journalism that ain’t. Even when it’s done by a journalist.

The Steve Jobs Intel Question Guy

Bob Keefe, a correspondent for Cox Newspapers, has taken a lot of heat for a stupid question. Stupid question? Yeah, I think it probably was, too (because who didn’t already know the answer?), but how many of you have a direct quotation from Steve Jobs for a news article you’re working on? And a great quotation, at that? Kind of like wearing high-waters to school all day to win the $100 award for dorkiest outfit. It might have sounded dumb, but it got the asker exactly what he needed for his piece.

As for the journalist thing (Keefe uses quotation marks around the word journalist to refer to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber), there is a fundamental difference between a journalist who is self-employed, and a journalist who’s been validated by the hiring and editorial processes. But they’re both journalists. Doesn’t necessarily make one better than the other — Gruber’s got some chops that a lot of newspaper folks don’t — but I think most readers (especially those who don’t live and breathe blogs) are used to the level of comfort they get by believing that there’s an editorial process (fact-checking, copy-editing, etc.) behind the ink on the paper, and adherence to the ethics code of Sigma Delta Chi. Sadly, that editorial process and those ethics ain’t what they used to be, and that’s further served to blur the lines between citizen journalism and the Fourth Estate.

(Cox Newspapers owns seventeen dailies, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Palm Beach Post, as well as twenty-six weeklies/pennysavers around the US.)

This page has bee

Here is a web page at IBM about protecting yourself from XSS (cross-site scripting) vulnerabilities. To which you can add a bee! Because, you see, the page has an XSS vulnerability.

OOoooooh, the irony! Or, should I say, bzzzzz, the irony?

**UPDATE** Looks like someone at IBM noticed.

And you wonder…

…why it’s difficult to get women to attend IT conferences — much less speak at them? Check out RailsConf2007 (not really SFW…and you don’t have to watch the whole thing — the first 45 seconds is plenty for you to get the idea).

I actually know a gentleman who was at the conference, and he said there was at least one woman in attendance (how many more? Check this Flickr set of pictures from RailsConf 2007), and there was even a woman presenter.

I don’t know about you, but for me, that video is only slightly less mature than last¹ year’s² Rails conferences³.

I truly hope that the good, valuable tech conferences won’t start turning into beer parties.

Illustration

I am not going to even think about attempting to discuss what is art and what isn’t. But I do know what illustration is, and I know what GOOD illustration is. And I’ve recently found a bunch of really good illustration on the web.

Len over at Jawbone Radio just wrapped up the second installment of Monster By Mail — for $20, you get a custom, hand-drawn one-of-a-kind illustration based on a monster movie title of your choosing. Ten bucks additional gets you a video of the illustration being created. (Sadly, Len’s already closed ordering for the monster movie series, but expect another series soon.)

Then there’s Adam Koford’s monkey project — for ten bucks, you can make up a monkey name, and you’ll get a postcard with that monkey on it.

And also, Ben’s custom robot portraits are a bargain at only $10 (plus $1.15 or so postage), and they’re really good!

I love this idea. Original illustrations based on your own art or ideas. One-of-a-kinds.

I wish there were something I was good enough at that I could do that. It’s way cooler than having someone write on a banana, or a piece of toast.

Know of any other entrepreneurial artists who are doing excellent inexpensive custom work in high volume with a fast turnaround?

“Oh sure, RoR will scale…”

From an interview on Radical Behavior:

“By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right
now. Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues -
issues that any growing site eventually contends with – far sooner
than I think we would on another framework.

The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling
Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The problem
is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel
cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this
point in time there’s no facility in Rails to talk to more than one
database at a time. The solutions to this are caching the hell out
of everything and setting up multiple read-only slave databases,
neither of which are quick fixes to implement. So it’s not just
cost, it’s time, and time is that much more precious when people can[’t]
reach your site.

None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing
for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that
makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely
punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of
traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that
Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move
the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.

It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s
mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people
are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right
now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application
and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby
will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big
Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of
those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.”

Caption THIS.

I am grumpy, so now I shall grump. When Apple put movies in the iTunes store, I was glad. When I found out that they didn’t have closed captions, I was minused, and didn’t download any more movies from iTunes.

I’ve still got NetFlix, and I’ve still got TiVo, so I’ve still been able to watch movies. No sweat.  Can’t take advantage of iTunes movies, but OK.

Then, Amazon Unbox comes out. And  I can download Unbox movies to my TiVo! Cool! And there’s even  MONEY CREDITS, so I can try the first one or two for free. So I downloaded (as a rental) “Little Miss Sunshine”. Guess what. No captions. ARGH.

Closed captioning is a standard that has been around since well before the dawn of PC video. QuickTime even supports captioning…I’ve captioned stuff myself. So what’s the deal here? The world moves one step forward, and people who need or want captions are now a step behind where they were before.

I went to college with the guy who runs Unbox. Maybe I’ll drop him a line. Although I’m sure it’s either “someone else’s fault” or an “insurmountable technical challenge”. Feh.

Does she serve any purpose?

See the bottom comment — sometimes I wonder…

http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/mob.html?wmob=14832

The W3C does something…weird…

http://www.w3.org/2007/03/html-pressrelease

Pipes — Yahoo!’s AppleScript?

Yahoo! Pipes is getting a lot of press as the latest and greatest web mashup tool. OK, I’ll bite…

So I went over to take a peek. First of all, the whole thing is about as intuitive as AppleScript. Which is to say, you know that it’s “simple” to use, because everyone else says so. But no one will tell you really what it’s supposed to do or how you’re supposed to make it do it. There are lots of examples, but it’s kind of like putting ingredients out on a counter, and giving each ingredient a name and a description of its flavor, but not telling you what food group it’s from, what it reacts with, or how to combine it with the other ingredients in which volumes to make some outcome.

And that’s another issue — the outcome. What does it MAKE? Lists of stuff, I guess. I’m really not sure.

So I tried making my first Pipe. I could have written a UNIX pipe at the command line faster than this. But OK. So I want to find all the GoogleBase recipe entries for chocolate lava cake, and mash those up with all the Flickr pictures tagged with chocolate lava cake. I was able to do that after slogging through and finding the Union module (which is useful enough that it should probably be somewhere else, but that’s just my opinion).

But that looked stupid. I had a list of 20 recipes (why 20?), followed by a list of 20 Flickr pictures. I could have just gone and grabbed the individual RSS feeds for these and written ten lines of PHP. But OK. So it’s a visual envrionment and you don’t need to know any programming. Fine. I’ll still play along. Now I’d like to alternate — one Flickr picture and then one recipe, and then the second Flickr picture and the second recipe. I tried everything I could think of. I made sub-pipes. I used foreach operators. But I always got a list of recipes, and then a list of pictures.

Then I decided I’d already wasted enough time. There are no tutorials — just EXAMPLES. Well, ok. Showing me a picture of a bowl of clam chowder isn’t going to help me make clam chowder. Once they’ve got some decent documentation up, maybe I’ll give it a go again. But I’m not a college student who can sit around for half a day trying to use some tool to do something I can already do.

Which brings me to one other really quick point. Go to Pipes documentation page, and come back with a concise definition of what it is and why you’d want to use it. Then go to Google Base’s doc page and tell me what it is and why you’d want to use it.

Let’s see:
“remix popular feed types and create data mashups” = HUH? What is a ‘feed type’, and how do you ‘remix’ it? Am I a DJ?
“submit all types of online and offline content, which we’ll make searchable on Google” = Oh, it’s like Craigslist, only infinite content types.

Granted, they’re two different services doing different kinds of things, but Google’s approach to explaining it is completely different from Yahoo!’s. On Google’s first doc page, you see the most important questions that new visitors ask — What is it, and why would I use it? I showed you above the ‘what is it’, and here’s the why, “If you have information you want to share with others but aren’t sure how to reach them, Google Base is for you. You can easily submit all types of online and offline content to Base, and if your content isn’t online yet, we’ll put it there.” Well, my mother can understand that!

On Yahoo!’s first doc page, it asks the question ‘What is Pipes?’, but then sends me to an overview for a ‘quick introduction’. OK…I get the answer to the what question (again, as above), but there’s no why. Why? Why do I want to use Pipes? The example it shows me is how to find out how many dog pictures are on Flickr. Hmm, ok, or I could just go to Flickr and type ‘dog’ into the search field, and see how many came up.

Maybe I’m missing something. I’m sure there’s potential out there for this to do something really cool, but until then, I’m going to use it as much as I use AppleScript.

Published

I was a journalist for almost ten years, but the fun and excitement of a byline never wore off. It’s always fun to publish something that you know other people will read, and that might actually *help* someone…give ‘em ideas or something.

This week, Digital Web published a little thing I wrote about a tool that I’ve been using for a while now, the SimpleXML function in PHP. I hope someone finds it helpful.

Are they *completely* insane?

I went to a conference about ‘getting online’ in San Francisco back in 1994 or so. I was working at a glossy magazine, and we were investigating the online world. As an editor, I was using AOL for Windows (which had just come out) for research — it was quicker an easier than calling the library’s reference desk forty times a day.

The big question at the time, though, was, “AOL, or HTML?” Do you create a relationship with AOL, and put your content there, or do you strike out on your own and create a ‘web site on the internet?’ I remember sitting next to a woman from HBO, and they were grappling with the same decision our magazine was.

Steve Case wasn’t able to convince me. On the flight back, I sat (in business class, when business class used to MATTER) next to a guy with a book about HTML, and between SFO and ORD, he really sealed the decision for me. I bought my own HTML book shortly afterwards, and to the web we went.

It would have been a bad idea to give up control of our company’s information and image to AOL. The web allowed us to control and change our message whenever we wanted, and I knew that was going to be worth the investment of time that we’d make striking out on our own, doing it for ourselves.

Well, now Steve Case is involved with another venture that wants to help you out. RevolutionHealth.com (no, no link) sounds like an interesting idea, helping folks with their medical issues, records, and billing. What? Wait a minute. They want you to PUT YOUR MEDICAL RECORDS ON THE INTERNET? Are they INSANE?

I just don’t know what would compel someone to create a business model based on something like this. We’ve learned time and time again that our financial information isn’t safe online. How many times have you had to change credit cards? Most people I know have had to. Online banking is ’secure’…but not THAT secure. Difference is, your money is insured, and if someone steals it, you can get it back.

You can’t unpublish data, though. Nosy folks can’t unlearn the fact that you’ve got surgery coming up, or you take medications for anxiety, or you had an abortion, or that you have a genetic predisposition for breast cancer, or whatever else your medical records might reflect.

At World Wide Web 2004 in Manhattan, Tim Berners-Lee talked about the semantic web, and how you’ll be able to link dates with events, and then those events with people, and then those people with information — and while it all sounded really cool, all I could think of is the fact that everyone I went to a cocktail party with could suddenly have access to x-rays of my broken ankle. This new service makes that frightening possibility that much more real.

So, thanks for AOL, Steve Case, but I’m going to sit this one out.