Guts

I'm going to keep this short, because I need to get back to installing MySQL on my laptop. After digging through some very thick CSS just to change the color of the links in the CODA (slideshow thing... named after the first guys to do it, who are geniuses) I realized that I had to go ahead and install MySQL+Wordpress so I can get a full working duplicate of MoneyCommons in a safe place where I can - how should I say this? - break it.

I'm almost there... I just need to get it to interact with my PHP install.

Of course, this is sort of over my head. I'm improvising. And so far... well, I'm making progress. Slowly.

KOMU went smoothly. Two reporters spent the duration of our shift debating if Ash Wednesday was a Catholic holiday.

My response: "Wait, Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent? Go figure... I didn't know that."

Tara looked at me like I was nuts. That seems fair.

Embedding things

Weekly rip on ACM: All of our problems tonight could have been avoided if ACM had a decent "preview" button. (Of course, we could've double checked everyone's work more carefully and get the same result, but blaming the technology feels better than admitting fault.)

On an unrelated note, the draft of the MoneyCommons Widget is coming along. I'm really surprised that the hardest part so far was embedability.

That's really weird. I started using php because it allows for Includes. You can type a short line of code that literally splices documents together. And for some reason that I think involves the positions of files after they've been rendered by WordPress, including the widget on the page gave me an error.

I wound up going the iframe route. And yes, I'm one of those web-standards people doesn't like iframes. But it's cross-browser compatible, it looks okay, and it's very embedable.

I'd never been a big fan of Flash. Partially because the first large project I ever did on it became corrupted. True, it's good at animation, being a video player, etc. But as far as interfaces go, Javascript + CSS are easier to use and do a better job.

But at the same time, my dog could embed a Flash object in a page with no real extra work of the developer's or the dog's part. Not true for the sort of js/php/css interfaces I built for PRX and (sort of) the widget. (Entire stylesheet had to be restructured to make the iframe work.)

Does this mean I'm warming up to Flash? Maybe. I'm still convinced its overused (although not as much as it used to be), but that doesn't mean I don't want to learn it.

And that's why I'm seriously considering that Flash authoring class for next semester.

Mobile things

I was arguing with myself about what to include in my ePortfolio (more on that later) when I found myself stumbling around on the RJI Collaboratory for no particular reason. I found this:

Mobile App Standards:(From mobile session): The Collaboratory can work towards creating standardized platform of mobile applications/interfaces

Whoa...

RJI admits that's out of its league - it belongs to Google, Apple, and Amazon. But that's an interesting question nonetheless.

I have an HTC Tilt. I don't read news on it. Partially because I refuse to pay $500 per year for a data connection when there's WiFi virtually everywhere I go. But for the most part, I don't want to read anything longer than a quick email on a tiny screen.

Does anyone else agree with that? Not at all. Every iPhone user has a special relationship zooming in and out of CNN.com.

On the other hand, I understand, and agree, that mobile devices have limitless potential for breaking news. Especially with the coming of the Integrated World (a less dreary version of The Cloud), which will let you receive a newsbrief, and push a button to send the developing story to your laptop. Not to mention streaming video and audio - especially on mobile devices - is in its infancy.

Here's a question: do we need new standards, or do we already have them?

RSS is very good at deploying headlines. H.264 is incredibly efficient for video. MP3 streaming (or download) is easy. And some of this is stuff you can do with Twitter, which is already very mobile friendly.

So it seems what we need isn't new standards, but new software... Songbird style projects that "revolutionize" the web. The problem is, we need it for iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Palm OS and it's successor, Web OS, Google Android, and Symbian.

I doubt these applications will be standardized. Why should they be? iPhones and Palm Pre may work well with a touchy, glassy interface, but when RIM came out with a finger-oriented Blackberry it got really bad reviews, because that's not what Blackberry users want.

And of course, there's still the Kindle, which kept selling out despite the fact that it was a Generation 1 proof-of-concept that was not easy to read. Generation 2 is supposed to be a sweeping improvement, but what will it look like in 2015? Will there be a day when the New York Times simply stops printing and delivers a daily digital paper to millions of subscribers' eReaders?

And that, for the record, is something people seem to be willing to pay for.

Hmm...

Tweeting and Cake

To summarize this week at KOMU, ACM was a pain in the ass (as usual) and I made a huge breakthrough on the Money Commons Widget. Next step: embedability and aesthetics, then we're good to go.

But I don't want to dwell on that, because there's a much more interesting discussion/rant floating around Twitter.

I'm sold on Twitter. It took me almost 3 weeks, but I'm starting to see how it will becoming increasingly useful as I acquire more contacts.

Backstory: I know a lot of technical people. Most of them don't understand Twitter. Some of them laughed when I told them I had one. And for good reason: I don't care when that person I met yesterday at KOMU is doing their laundry.

Facebook emerged as a way to keep in touch with everyone you've ever met. It has utility. Twitter, or microblogging in general, sounds really petty. But what it becomes is one giant ongoing communal chatroom.

And the moment Jen mentioned "forced tweeting," my feed exploded. And it wasn't a neverending dribble of people doing routine things, it was a discussion.

There's a downside: I could only see a small part of the conversation, because I'm not following all the participants. So I thought being forced to Twitter meant being told, "Go sign up for Twitter and play with it." Apparently it meant "Jump in and use this as a reporting tool."

I have to agree, that's a terrible idea.

Why? Because it's just like giving Missourian reporters cameras. They go shoot without mics, you can't hear through the wind, they don't white balance, and when they come back to edit they put a dissolve between every cut.

It's not their fault, you just can't throw people into that without some sort of practice.

And then there's the other dilemma. We'll call it "The Things I See When I Google Myself" Dilemma. Or, more importantly, "Things My Future Employer Will See When He Googles Me" Dilemma.

We live in a funny age. There are lot's of people who support blogging, Twitter, the idea that everyone can publish their thoughts at the click of the button. And then there's the old guard who not only stay out of it, but will making hiring decisions based on what they find in people's personal content.

Some of this is common sense, of course. No one can reasonably think that posting drunken pictures of themselves in a public forum is a good iea. But at the same time, CNN has fired people for blogging. Most of the time, they weren't blogging about work, either.

This can be pretty extreme, especially when we get into some old school journalists who solemnly believe journalists shouldn't vote in order to remain objective.

And here's a slightly radical suggestion: there's absolutely no way to determine what will upset someone you haven't met.

So we have some options. We can operate semi-anonymously, using handles and protected profiles. We can write nothing but sterile material. (I have almost never conducted an interview where something isn't being held back because the source - for entirely fair reasons - doesn't want it published.) We can say to hell with it, that we don't want to work for anyone who wouldn't hire us on the basis of a blog isn't someone we want to work for. (Requires large ego.)

But in all likelihood, this will resolve itself in the next decade.

In the meantime, I have a suprisingly Google-proof name.

Thinking out loud

I used to be an RSS junkie. I had 20 feeds, I skimmed the entire batch on a daily basis, and it took me over an hour to read everything. One day I discovered I had better things to spend my time on, and quit.

Two or three relapses later, I broke the habit, and something funny happened: I had to stick to glancing over a small handful of sites on a regular basis.

And something funny happened.

I kept checking Time Magazine, Ars Technica, and Reddit, but all the big news outlets went.

No more CNN.

And why? Because CNN was breaking stories a day after the new media outlets discovered it, and a day before Time wrote a thorough, well-sorted explanation.

In hindsight, Ars was doing the same thing with science-technology issues. The day after CNN ran the Megan Meier story, Ars wrote a better story that actually covered the issues, instead of just the event.

That's not to say CNN is doing a bad job, just that they're reporting on a very microscopic level.

Which brings me back to the Missourian.

I spent the second half of the summer working on the Public Safety Beat, and wound up covering this controversy emerging from the Columbia police being armed with tasers.

It was an incredibly complicated story. We had documented cases where police used a taser (usually just as a threat) to put an end to a violent confrontation without anyone getting hurt. At the same time, all of Columbia saw the man who fell off the bridge over the summer, and I met an 18-year-old kid, who, after being the victim of an assault, was tasered 5 times by an officer who may have fudged his report. The kid was charged, and the prosecutor dropped the case and advised the kid to sue the city.

And to top it all off, the public understanding of what a taser is and how it works, including what the Missourian had already printed, was flat out wrong. No fault on the previous reporters; they got their information from the parties leading the debate, and they were confused too.

So there was a place for a compelling, complex narrative that really explored all the different elements in play of a very hot, controversial topic.

We never wrote it.

We wrote a lot of taser stories, but they were always micro. Someone holding a meeting. Someone protesting. Something happened. And yes, we needed to do all of that, but in all these little incidents, any sense of on explanation of what was happening got lost.

The economic crisis is infinitely more complicated than tasers ever were. It needs explanation. And of course, we've been seeing a long string of bad news, but the public needs more than that.

Which is why I really like the idea of having reporters go out and ask people basic questions, to just explain something to the public.

But I think we need to do this on two tiers.

I grew up Jewish fairly financially literate. I always assumed that everyone knew not to put things they couldn't afford on credit cards, that you can't pay for things with imaginary money... I'd never even heard of second mortgages.

My freshman year, I learned exactly how wrong I was. The level of not so much irresponsibility
but sheer cluelessness was staggering.

But at the same time, in talking to other people who would never buy things they couldn't pay for in cash about the economy, I noticed something: none of us had the slightest clue what we were talking about.

So perhaps, in addition to asking common sense advice questions for the people who have already found themselves in debt, we should try and make sense of the jargon flying around the regular news. At an earlier time, that would mean finding someone to explain what Freddie Mac actually did. This week, it would be the logic of behind stimulus package, Keynesianism etc. Just whatever is appearing in other stories, especially if they're local.

Will it work? No idea.