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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This blog has moved, but you probably won’t really notice if you always went to lanniebyrd.com to read it. If you went to some other address or read the rss feed, then you probably did notice it moved.

I switched from having blogger ftp the blog to my host at mediabyrd.com/lanniebyrd with lanniebyrd.com as a forwarded domain to that address to using blogger’s new custom domain name service. It was very easy to set-up. I just had to point the www record in the DNS to blogger’s domain service and turn it on in the control panel.

I’ve had this blog with blogger almost six years (since February 2001) and many times I’ve thought about moving to some other hosting service or hosting in my domain with some other blogger cms, but I’ve just stuck with blogger because it is so easy to use. Now, blogger has made some major upgrades and integration with google and I’m glad I have stuck with them.

Update: I am also in the process of adding labels to the posts from this blog. It’s very interesting looking back at what I’ve posted about to see what I am really interested in.

I know you probably haven’t seen this, but Veggie Tales is now airing during NBC’s Saturday morning kids show block. NBC’s Program Standards has required them to edit out any reference to God or the Bible to put the show on air. At the same time, NBC is promoting airing a live concert of Madonna’s where she sings suspended from a mirrored crucifix. The other day I found Phil Vischer’s (the Veggie Tales creator) blog and he says,

“I know the audience and time of day is completely different, but it is a bit ironic that telling kids God loves them is “not okay,” but singing a song while mocking the crucifixion is fine and dandy. Let us Christians never forget that we are strangers here. We don’t fit in. It’s ok.”

Vischer’s blog is pretty good because it chronicles the story as he keeps sending them episondes with God in them and they keep making him change them. He also some introspective posts where goes back and looks at what went wrong at VeggieTales and why they had to sell out to another company.

I’ve tried to use several RSS (really simple syndication) readers over the years, but haven’t ever found any that did it for me. So, I’ve just ignored RSS. A few months ago tried out Bloglines for a second time and I really, really like it– I mean use it two or three times a day like it. I’m not if the difference is in bloglines or my mind set, but it makes a lot of sense to me now to be able to read everything in one place. It also seperates all the content from the design of the blogs and I can churn through the content a lot faster than I can the content + design.