Computer glitch triggers Dow Jones free fall

Today the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 416 points (about 3.3 percent). According to the Washington Post the main free fall in the market was "triggered by a technological glitch that caused a backlog of trades to be calculated at nearly the same time." The story reported that about $600 billion in market value was loss. Now, the Dow was going to drop anyway today, but without the technical glitch how bad would the drop have been?

I know how much of our security and economy is based on computers and how fragile computer systems can be. To me it's surprising that this kind of occurrence is as rare as it is.

Ignore your sat nav

England has now posted the First 'ignore your sat nav' roadsigns on roads where satellite navigation equipment literally steer drivers down the wrong path.

Feed Burner

I switched my RSS feed over to feedburner. They provide stats for all the RSS readers subscribed to your blog. Thanks for the tip Chris.

Roanoke Times Editor Ad

The Roanoke Times and Roanoke.com has recently become one of the most celebrated online news operations (with references from Howard Owens and Rob Curley among others). Well, they are looking for a new editor and their ad for an editor is a little different because they are looking for a different kind of editor. They produced a website with a multimedia ad including a host who talks to you and welcomes you around the site (shot green screen supered in front of page of classifieds) and videos from reporters telling you what they want to see in a new editor.

What does it mean?

What does it mean when your wife sends you this article and says "This is what would happen to you if you lived in China."

• China treats Internet ‘addicts’ sternly

That makes me sort of scared for what she might have planned.

XM Radio, Sirius announce merger

XM Radio and Sirius announced a merger yesterday. I guess the real question for is how satellite radio will look after the merger is over. Will the lack of competition between products cause the stations to offer fewer channels and fewer viewpoints? Will the lack of competition cause radio and service prices to rise? Will the lack of competition cause federal regulators to intervene because of the new monopoly status and use of the airwaves?

Yahoo patent to take down customized portals

The US Patent office has just issued Yahoo a patent for customizable web page. In 1997 Yahoo filed a patent for a "dynamic page generator" that allowed a user to save a page and then have that page generate customized information. Just stop for a second and think about all the websites that offer this service that are now in violation of Yahoo's patent. Just to name a few Google, Amazon, Bloglines and just about every major corporations intranet portal. The real question now is whether Yahoo will attempt to enforce it's patent and request payments for everyone that uses there patented technology.

Gannett reports on business strategy

Mega newspaper corporation Gannett reviewed their business strategy back in December in a report to investment banking house Credit Suisse. The reports are only available as mostly boring hour long audio files, so you can go and see all the highlights posted on the Innovation in College Media blog. Here's a couple of highlights that made me take notice.

• Gannett has trained 380 new videographers.
  
• Local and hyper-local content is the key in a news conversation future.
  
• They will focus on developing thousands of microsites.

New Huckabee site

The Mike Huckabee exploratory committee launched a new web site. It is a big improvement over the previous iteration that I blogged about when announced he was running for president. Some of the improvements in the sight include a title (I Like Mike), campaign blog, video, links to social networking sites Huckabee groups, refer a friend link and email sign-up for more information. My main criticism of the site would be the lack of meta tags, circa 1999 table based design and failure to use alt tags. Adding meta tags, using appropriate alt tags on header images and using semantic markup on the page would really help increase the sites' SEO.

Web stat tools

I've used a few of web analytic tools over the year, but by far my favorite was ClickTracks. They even made me a featured user on their site last year. My first web stat tool was Analog and then I added the Report Magic package onto it to build visual reports. Analog did a great job, provided the information I needed at the time, but I got tired of waiting for the reports to run so after trying AWStats I found the money to switch Deep Metrix's LiveStats. After a few upgrades on LiveStats, I started having some server/database issues so I switched to ClickTracks. The level of analysis and targeting for ClickTracks is very impressive for the price.

Lately, I've been using Google Analytics (formerly Urchin) for all of my sites. It's very easy to get up and running, provides full featured reports and it's free. For a long time I used tools that analyze log files because you didn't have to add any code (javascript) to all the pages on your site, but with the data that Google Analytics provides with their script I think it is worth the hassle of editing each page to add the code. Besides if you used templates on your pages, adding the code isn't too much trouble.

AJC steps back and refocuses

The Atlanta Journal Constitution has announced they are cutting their print circulation area and focusing on growing digital. This is similar to the same steps taken in the past year by the Dallas Morning News and Gannett.

Half of IDG's revenues online by 2009

Colin Crawford, from the publishing company IDG predicts on his blog that half of the revenue will be generated online by 2009. IDG's primary publications are niche technology magazines like Computerworld, CIO, Infoworld and Networkworld to the Consumer Technology segment with brands such as PCWorld, Macworld and GamePro. He says that currently online revenues generate 35 percent of total US revenues.

Google Typo?

Google went missing a consonant on Valentine's Day...

According to the Google blog, the typo was on purpose. They call it a "subtle" design.

Time lapse experiments

I've seen a couple of very interesting Time Lapse movies and I have been investigating the best techniques for shooting and putting one together. I found one pretty good tutorial on the equipment needed and technique and decided to try one out.



In this video I collapsed 16 minutes down to 6 seconds running at 6 frames per second. The recommended timing for time lapse videos is 10 to 15 frames a second, so I ran it pretty slow, but this 16 second video is short and 15 frames a second ended up running on about 10 secnds long. The first time I uploaded the video to YouTube I had compressed the video down in MPEG4 to 320X240 at 6 fps and then uploaded it and it turned out really ugly and pixelated. Then, I just turned around and uploaded the full size .mov quicktime file (69 MB) which was 1000X667 at 6 fps and it handled YouTube's compression pretty well.

This one turned ok for a first attempt. I think I should have dragged my shutter on the camera more to blur the motion. I think I'm going to try this again at night sometime on a busy street corner to get headlights moving down the street. It would aslo be fun to do with a parade. So, be on the look out for more time lapse experiments.

Me, myself and Bob

I just read Me, Myself, and Bob: A True Story About God, Dreams, and Talking Vegetables an autobiography by VeggieTales creator Phil Vischer this weekend. The writing is a little quirky and the pacing dragged a little bit in the early chapters, but as the book picked up his stories about creation and demolition of Big Idea were very interesting. He also has a nice couple of closing chapters about what he learned looking back on Big Idea's collapse.

The most interesting fact in the whole Big Idea saga is that losing a lawsuit was the final straw that brought about the bankruptcy and sale of Big Idea and then in the ruling was overturned on appeal, but it was too late for to save Big Idea.

For safety or spying?

Texas Republican Congressman, Lamar Smith, has introduced a bill that will require ISPs to record all users surfing activity, IM conversations and email traffic indefinitely. Smith cites the increasing sophistication of cyber-crimes and cyber-terrorists as the motivation for the bill. Unfortunately, I don't think we can trust the government with access to this kind of information.

Photoshop Alternatives

In his Web Tips column on Poynter.org Sree Sreenivasan looks at some web based Photoshop Alternatives. The four web based photo editors he recommends are

• Picnik.com
  
• Snipshot.com
  
• Pixer.us
• Fauxto.com (pronounced "photo")

I've never used any of these, but I plan on checking them out. Especially Picnik.com which he says integrates well with Flickr (check out my Flickr flash badge on put on the right hand side of this page).

Online mini films create new genre

I think we are seeing the advent of a new form media on the Internet right now with the emergence of the serialized mini-film. The first popular example of this was LonelyGirl15 which turned out to be highly scripted and directed. Now I have found similarly formatted film in 39 Second Single, a weekly video about a 39-year-old Manhattanites dating life. All the episodes in this new genre are extremely short running from 1 to 3 minutes and each episode is highly focused on one subject. But, as a whole you see a plot line with twists and turns.

I wonder what attracts viewers to these mini-films? I'm sure it's mainly voyeuristic, but what else makes people keep coming back? Is this where the Washington Post's OnBeing received inspiration and is trying to do with real people? But, they post on different people every week. I guess I'm still confused about that one.

SEO your headlines

Copy editors and designers for newspapers try to write catchy headlines for their print editions, but when those headlines are shoveled on to the web as a link to a story they become misleading to the reader and and even harder for a search engine to understand. Many newspapers depend on search engine traffic to help boost their websites bottom line and one important way to attract more web traffic is to write summary headlines. A recent article on ZDNet describes how the Boston Globe's copy editors rewrite their newspaper headlines for the web before the stories are exported to the web every night making their website Boston.com the fourth most trafficked US newspaper site on the web (even though they are ranked 15th in circulation).

Me and Politics

I just recently started posting on politics, particularly focusing on politicians use of online media to promote themselves/their causes. For some of my regular readers (all two of you) my interest in politics will come as a shock, but I guess I am trying to integrate (converge) my interests in online interactive media and politics.

I've been interested in politics and social studies since I was in high school. I was political science major in college (along with another major in mass communications). I used to tell people that I majored in journalism to make a living (I didn't know how little some journalists made at that time) and in political science so I would know what I was talking about. I was even a member of College Republicans for about one semester-- soon after that I renounced any affiliation with a political party and led the school newspaper staff in poking holes in the student power structure.

I would say that I have dual political highlights so far in my life. In 1999 at a college I worked for hosted President Bill Clinton, three or four cabinet members and the CEO of FedEx and USA Truck and the COO of UPS for a Transportation Education summit. I was allowed to set-up the video, sound and computer systems needed for the event, design the presentation our college president used, videotape and provide support during the event. I had a great time working with the White House staff and the Secret Service.

My second highlight came during the 2000 elections in November 2000 as I worked for the web site of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn. I was the producer working the overnight shift for election night and my job was to come in at 5 p.m. and leave when the winners were announced and the losers conceded. The next morning at 5 a.m., I was still working when my relief came in. When many other sights had given the election to Gore or Bush that night I held fast and never posted a winner. About a month later I was working breaking news during the day when I got to post Bush as the eventual President-elect.

Local and state politics online

While a lot of my internet-politics post will focus on the 2008 presidential race, I found Arkansas Representative, Steve Harrelson's blogger blog Under the Dome last night. He serves as the Arkansas House of Representatives Majority Leader and posts to his blog multiple times throughout the day from on the floor of the house. His posts primarily consist of summary of bills that the legislature is considering, his opinion on those bills with some quotes from some other members of the legislature thrown in for good measure and every once in a while some live-blogging from the house committees that he serves on.

I'm really proud that a member of Arkansas' legislature is doing this. I wonder how many other state legislatures (or even Congressmen) have blogs they post to from the floor when their body is in session? I'm thinking that it can't be too many. This blog is a great example of what open government should be.

Politics and the Internet

The Internet is playing an increasingly important role in help citizens shape their political reviews. The Pew Internet and the American Life 2006 Elections Online (pdf) released last month presents a revealing look at how Americans use the Internet with relations to politics. The findings in this report include

• 15 percent of Americans used the Internet as their primary source of information for political news (up from 7 percent in 2004).
• 31 percent of Americans used the Internet to get some form of political news.
• 23% of Internet Election news users became campaign activists posting their own political commentary, forwarding someone else's commentary, creating political audio or videos or forwarding political audio or videos.
• Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to look for political information online. Democrats cite newspapers and broadcast news operations like CBS, NBC and CNN as their news sources and Republicans favor Fox News and talk radio.
  

Throughout the 2008 election cycle I plan on analyzing election sites by looking at the technology used, design standards and search engine optimization. Hopefully, we can some interesting information and maybe where and why certain politicians succeed online and others fail.

On Being -- Rob Curley's new thing?

The Washington Post launched On Being this week. Is this the new product that Rob Curley was talking about last week when discussed the Naples Daily News Studio 55? Howard Owens has some questions about it, too. And I guess that I don't completely get it, either.

Even though the video is cool (even available in HD) and production values are high, I have yet to watch a whole profile of anyone. I just get bored before it is over (normally about a minute in) and click on something else. I plan on trying to make myself watch a whole segment to see if I am missing something. So far they all look like a highly edited first-person, personal profile, a this is my life in my own words story.

Mii and my Wii

This past weekend we found a Nintendo Wii. I've been looking for one since Christmas. Looking is probably overstating it, but whenever I was at the local Wal-Mart or electronic stores, I've check out their videogame section to see if they have a Wii in stock. On Sunday afternoon, I found a Wii at Wal-Mart and after a quick phone call to my wife Jennifer I was getting a Wii for my birthday (in March).

The Wii was incredibly easy to set-up and before you know it I had the wifi connection running and we all had our own Mii on our Wii. The only misstep I found in the set-up is that when I turned on the wifi connection the Wii asked if I wanted to download updates. I acquiesced and then it set off downloading and installing updates which took at least an hour. I don't know if this is normal or if my DSL connection was running slow or if Nintendo's servers were slowing it down, but eventually I just let it run and left to go to a friends to watch the Superbowl.

After the Superbowl, I had a chance to play a few games and then on Monday morning my kids got a hold of it. Here's a few observations on the Wii.

• It's incredibly easy to set-up and use. My young daughter was using it and navigating through the menus with no help at all. She only had a little trouble getting the wireless remote to point at the right button.
• Using the wireless remote controls in most of the games (we've just played Wii Sports so far) is very intuitive. The most natural player of us all was again my 6-year-old daughter. She was the best in our family at boxing and golf.
• There are some safety issues with the wireless remote. My son failed to tighten the strap a couple of times and flung it out of hand against a wall as he was playing baseball and tennis.
• You can play the Wii standing up and get a work out or you can sit on your rear and play along by just swinging your arm. I always play better when I play standing up.
• There are endless opportunities for extra information, media and retail channels on the Wii. The AP news site and weather is very easy to navigate and has great graphics and photographs. The Wii commerce is good too, but there are so many opportunities to show and tell besides just these.
  

Web 2.0 explained in a video

Just as I was explaining to a class about web 2.0, I ran across this wonderful video mashup from Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University of text, screenshots and music explaining the Web 2.0 concept.

Kodak flip flops printer pricing model

Kodak whose photography business has virtually collapsed with the popularity of digital photography is flipping the traditional printer pricing model on its head. Instead of selling the printer cheap and charging enormous sums for ink, Kodak plans to sale the printer between $100 and $200 and sale the ink for around $25 a pop rather than $60 to $80 for replacement ink. Manufacturer's make as much as 75 percent profit on the sale of ink (a $32 billion worldwide market).

The end result of this move is the reduction in cost of printing your own photos from around 40 to 50 cents each to 10 cents each (and that price is before the ink pricing war takes off). Which means that printing your own photos will be cheaper than getting them printed online through some photo service or at your local Wal-Mart or Walgreen. Of course, the photos printed with cheap ink won't be the same as your prints ordered from the professional photo house (just like the Wal-Mart one-hour photo service isn't the same).

Local no longer relevant?

At the NAA Marketing Conference Tom Mohr breeched the idea this week that "local is no longer an organizing principle in the interactive world." Seeing that this is a newspaper conference and newspapers are locally oriented, this statement is like another nail in the newspaper coffin.

In his presentation (pdf link) on whether newspapers and their websites are allies or competitors Mohr presented a couple of interesting facts (of course we lose context reading these points from his presentation handout):

• The medium age of newspapers.com is 42.
• Only 5.5% of newspaper revenue is online revenue.
  
• Technology innovation will shape human experience through increased bandwidth, location aware mobile devices, smarter search, ubiquitous computing and usability.
• Mohr's solution is partnering and national networks, but says getting newspapers to cooperate is like "herding cats."
  

Thanks to Poynter's E-Media Tidbits for pointing out this bit.

DMCA enforcement taken to the absurd

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has had many critics since it was enacted, but now the enforcement of it has to been taken to the extreme in recent days. Here's two sample cases.

• The inventor of the dance the "Electric Slide" has begun filing DMCA take down notices to YouTube for every video with the Electric Slide in it and sent licensing demands to the Ellen DeGeneres Show.
• Viacom is serving YouTube with DMCA take down notices for any video slightly related to any show produced by Viacom. In the process some legitimate videos having nothing to do with Viacam have been purged, too by the copyright zealot.

The DMCA goes to the extreme in protecting the copyright holder and offers extreme penalties to organizations hosting the files in potential copyright violation forcing them into knee jerk reactions as seen by YouTube above. Unfortunately, everyone predicted this when Google paid an enormous amount of money for YouTube.

If you are interested in learning more about copyright law's influence in innovation and copyright law's manipulation by large corporations read something by Lawrence Lessig.

Pedestrian Bridge

The Arkansas Highway Department was forced to close the Arkansas Hwy 7 bridge over the Ouachita River South of Arkadelphia due to flooding on the South side of the river. When they close the bridge during a flood long-time residents enjoy walking out over the river to watch the swift current.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette launches redesign

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette launched a much needed redesign today. The site had some small enhancements over the past year, but desperately needed some major help. I'm sure their web staff is glad to get the redesign monkey off their back and out the door (I've experienced that kind of relief many times before), but there are a major standards compliance issues, some programming bugs, design mishaps and an overall flawed approach to what a local newspaper website should be

First, Standards Compliance: It's 2007 folks, not 2001. Tables are out. Using divs as tables is out. We are now in the days of the semantic web where your html and styles describe and contribute to your content creating accessibility across browsers, platforms and devices. (I won't even mention the using line breaks and special characters to build lists instead of unordered lists and list items). Unfortunately with circa 2001 coding, your site design will start to break in the next round of new web browsers that will start to enforce standards. If you are interested in this learning more on Standard Compliant HTML start out with Eric Meyer's CSS Web Site Design and once you have a handle on Eric's concept move on to Dave Clarke's Transcending CSS: the Fine Art of Web Design.

Second, The Bug: The second time I visited the website it said "Welcome Charles Munkberg" and gave me the typical "Not Charles Munkberg? Click here" option. Well, I'm not Charles Munkberg and nor has he ever used my computer. He must be the default/test user in their sql recordset or some random cookie problem. Thankfully, this is normally an easy bug to fix in less than five minutes, lets see how long it persists.

Third, Design Mishaps: First let me say there are some good things about their design and it is 300 times better than their old design. I really like the flash photos and headlines in the top left. Most major metro newspapers are using that format now and it really works for them. I also like the design of the video section on the right especially the inclusion of the THV video (good job working that partnership out). For some reason, the scrolling headlines between the flash photos and the videos really get to me under the latest news heading on their page. I think there are too many headlines in that section and they are scrolling way too fast. The search bar is next as you scroll down the page and it is just out of place in that location. The rest of the page proceeds with a three column layout that is nice, but could use some more photos or graphics. The inside section pages work out ok design wise, I like the fact they included at least one photo on each of those pages. The main thing that I don't see is the ads. There are no external ads above the scroll on the home page, the section pages or the story pages. I guess they will add those later.

Fourth, a flawed online approach: The Democrat-Gazette's online strategy has two big flaws.

• A failure to focus on being the home page for Arkansas/Metro Little Rock. The inclusion of so much AP national news and video on their home page makes it look like the Demazette is competing with CNN and MSNBC. For national news, people will visit those websites. For local information (much, more than just news) people visit local websites.
• Many newspaper companies have decided they are no longer "newspaper" companies, but information companies that publish their news in print, online and where ever they find readers and advertisers (Former Arkansas Gazette owners, Gannett are the largest company embracing this philosophy, but many other newspapers are running down the same path). However, the Democrat-Gazette is following the dual newsroom approach. One set of designers, reporters, photographers for print and one set for the web (and so far the web has one videographer, one online editor and few part-time web assistants). Their reasoning behind this is that they don't want the online product to harm the reputation of the print product-- which admittedly the Demazette has a good reputation resulting in the highest circulation penetration for a newspaper its size. However, the dual newsroom philosophy vastly under powers your web and actually harms the reputation of the associated newspaper for it's failures in coverage and design. Additionally, it fails to plan for the future of the newspaper with an overall decline in newspaper circulation and the virtual abandonment of newspapers by readers under 35.
• To protect their circulation of their newspaper, the Democrat-Gazette requires paid subscriptions for their website. Only publications with highly cherished information are successful this route (like the Wall-Street Journal, college sports websites or pornography). Many newspapers require registration so that they have more demographic information about their readers to sale ads with, but few require a paid subscription. Again, the Demazette's argument to paid subscribers is they can include and visitors to their website under a paid subscription model in their official circulation numbers. Unfortunately, allowing only paid subscribers to access your web site ruins advertising sales and any special up sales you can make via online classified sales (even if online classifieds are accessible to everyone). This is especially ridiculous in the Democrat-Gazette's case because virtually the whole newspaper they want you to pay to access on their website is available for free on their Northwest Arkansas edition's web site.
  

Finally, a couple of disclaimers. I am sure their web staff worked really hard on this redesign and despite my criticisms it is a huge step forward and actually brings the site in the 21st century. I know for a fact that they have a tiny staff devoted to the web with a couple of other departments helping out (IT and design) and for what they are given they have done a great job launching the redesign. Also, as you can probably read in my general criticisms of their approach to a newspaper website that I was once privy to some inside information as I had some discussions with their newsroom leaders when they were redefining their website a year ago. I did my Master's thesis on newspaper's websites uses of technology, so I am pretty well versed in that area.

Guerilla marketing mistaken for terror plot

The Carton Networks Adult Swim Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerilla marketing campaign in Boston was mistaken for a terror plot as their magnetic lighting devices placed around Boston were mistaken for bombs. The Lost Remote's Steve Safran broke the news that it was not bombs, but actually a marketing campaign.